Apical constriction changes cell shapes, driving critical morphogenetic events, including gastrulation in diverse organisms and neural tube closure in vertebrates. Apical constriction is thought to be triggered by contraction of apical actomyosin networks. We found that apical actomyosin contractions began before cell shape changes in both Caenorhabitis elegans and Drosophila. In C. elegans, ac...

Tissue morphogenesis is the process in which coordinated movements and shape changes of large numbers of cells form tissues, organs, and the internal body structure. Understanding morphogenetic movements requires precise measurements of whole-cell shape changes over time. Tissue folding and invagination are thought to be facilitated by apical constriction, but the mechanism by which changes nea...

BACKGROUND The morphogenetic events of early vertebrate development generally involve the combined actions of several populations of cells, each engaged in a distinct behavior. Neural tube closure, for instance, involves apicobasal cell heightening, apical constriction at hingepoints, convergent extension of the midline, and pushing by the epidermis. Although a large number of genes are known t...

During development, coordinated cell shape changes alter tissue shape. In the Drosophila ventral furrow and other epithelia, apical constriction of hundreds of epithelial cells folds the tissue. Genes in the Gα12/13 pathway coordinate collective apical constriction, but the mechanism of coordination is poorly understood. Coupling live-cell imaging with a computational approach to identify contr...

In lung development, the apically constricted columnar epithelium forms numerous buds during the pseudoglandular stage. Subsequently, these epithelial cells change shape into the flat or cuboidal pneumocytes that form the air sacs during the canalicular and saccular (canalicular-saccular) stages, yet the impact of cell shape on tissue morphogenesis remains unclear. Here, we show that the expres...

Throughout organismal development, precise three-dimensional organization of tissues is required for proper tissue function. These three-dimensional forms are generated by coordinated cell shape changes that induce global tissue shape changes, such as the transformation of an epithelial sheet into a tube. A model for this transformation occurs early in Drosophila development where approximately...

Apical constriction is a cell shape change that promotes tissue remodeling in a variety of homeostatic and developmental contexts, including gastrulation in many organisms and neural tube formation in vertebrates. In recent years, progress has been made towards understanding how the distinct cell biological processes that together drive apical constriction are coordinated. These processes inclu...

Tissue morphogenesis requires stereotyped cell shape changes, such as apical cell constriction in the mesoderm and cell intercalation in the ventrolateral ectoderm of Drosophila. Both processes require force generation by an actomyosin network. The subcellular localization of Myosin-II (Myo-II) dictates these different morphogenetic processes. In the intercalating ectoderm Myo-II is mostly cort...

Neurulation is a critical period in all vertebrates and results in the formation of the neural tube, which gives rise to the CNS. Apical constriction is one of the fundamental morphogenetic movements that drives neural tube closure. Using live imaging, we show that apical constriction during the neurulation is a stepwise process driven by cell-autonomous and asynchronous contraction pulses foll...