Cell polarity and morphogenesis: new technologies and new findings

Cell polarity in vivo PAR proteins play conserved roles in cell polarization in diverse animal systems. Daniel Dickinson (Bob Goldstein laboratory, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) developed a method for analyzing biochemical interactions in single cells and used it to show that PAR proteins transiently form oligomeric complexes in Caenorhabditis elegans zygotes. Formation of these complexes appears to be important for allowing PAR proteins to move with a transient polarized cortical flow. Adam Paré (Jennifer Zallen laboratory, Sloan Kettering Institute) addressed how cell polarity is orchestrated in the Drosophila embryo. He showed that three transmembrane receptors in the Toll receptor family are expressed in partially overlapping stripes, giving each stripe of cells a unique “Toll code” that orients cell polarity and cell movements that produce the elongated head-to-tail body axis (Paré et al., 2014).