Matt Gibson: The blueprints of tissue architecture

JCB • VOLUME 186 • NUMBER 2 • 2009 166 E pithelia come in all shapes and sizes. The cells themselves can be columnar, cuboidal, or squamous in shape, whereas the tissue as a whole can take up a variety of forms. Drosophila imaginal discs, for example, are fl attened epithelial sacs that develop into different adult organs and appendages, such as the eye and wing. Matt Gibson began his scientifi c career studying imaginal discs as a graduate student in Gerold Schubiger’s laboratory at the University of Washington, Seattle. There, he investigated the extracellular signals that regulate the growth and patterning of these primordial tissues (1–3). Gibson continued his work on epithelial morphogenesis during postdoctoral research with Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School. He uncovered an unexpected role for the BMP signaling pathway in controlling the shape, as well as fate, of epithelial cells depending on their position within imaginal discs (4). Gibson then led a second study explaining how the irregular “cobblestone” topology of proliferating epithelia arises in a predictable pattern as a direct result of cell division (5). In 2006, Gibson began his own laboratory at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, MO. He continues to study how proliferation and morphogenesis combine to form epithelia as diverse as a fl y’s wing and a sea anemone’s tentacle. In a recent interview, Gibson described how his own career has taken shape.