During animal gastrulation, the specification of the embryonic axes is accompanied by epithelio-mesenchymal transition (EMT), the first major change in cell shape after fertilization. EMT takes place in disparate topographical arrangements, such as the circular blastopore of amphibians, the straight primitive streak of birds and mammals or in intermediate gastrulation forms of other amniotes su...

Here we show that Ephrin–Eph signaling regulates Xenopus gastrulation via mediating tissue separation. XEph receptor is exclusively expressed in the involuting mesoderm, whereas XEphrin ligand is localized in the ectoderm region during Xenopus gastrulaiton. At the beginning of gastrulation, XEph expressing mesoderm is around blastopore lip, and XEphrin ligand expressing ecotoderm is placed righ...

ErbB signaling regulates cell adhesion and movements during Xenopus gastrulation, but the downstream pathways involved have not been elucidated. In this study, we show that phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI3K) and Erk mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) mediate ErbB signaling to regulate gastrulation. Both PI3K and MAPK function sequentially in mesoderm specification and movements, and ErbB...

During gastrulation of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, individual cells ingress into a solid ball of cells. Gastrulation in a basal nematode, in contrast, has now been found to occur by invagination into a blastocoel, revealing an unanticipated embryological affinity between nematodes and all other triploblastic metazoans.

The egg contains a set of molecules that can be used to trigger cell-shape changes leading to morphogenetic movements. The temporally and spatially controlled activation of these molecules, and hence the choreography of gastrulation movements, is determined by region-specific expression of transcription factors which turn on a set of downstream targets whose products mediate the successive step...

Chemokines play a crucial role in developmental processes and recent studies have revealed that they also control gastrulation movements. In this paper, we report the expression patterns of xSDF-1α, xCXCR4 and xCXCR7 and regulation of the expression of xSDF-1α and xCXCR4 during gastrulation. We performed whole mount in situ hybridization (WISH) and quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) analys...