RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Contact-dependent cell-cell communications drive morphological invariance during ascidian embryogenesis
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 238741
DO 10.1101/238741
A1 Léo Guignard
A1 Ulla-Maj Fiuza
A1 Bruno Leggio
A1 Emmanuel Faure
A1 Julien Laussu
A1 Lars Hufnagel
A1 Grégoire Malandain
A1 Christophe Godin
A1 Patrick Lemaire
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/24/238741.abstract
AB Canalization of developmental processes ensures the reproducibility and robustness of embryogenesis within each species. In its extreme form, found in ascidians, early embryonic cell lineages are invariant between embryos within and between species, despite rapid genomic divergence. To resolve this paradox, we used live light-sheet imaging to quantify individual cell behaviors in digitalized embryos and explore the forces that canalize their development. This quantitative approach revealed that individual cell geometries and cell contacts are strongly constrained, and that these constraints are tightly linked to the control of fate specification by local cell inductions. While in vertebrates ligand concentration usually controls cell inductions, we found that this role is fulfilled in ascidians by the area of contacts between signaling and responding cells. We propose that the duality between geometric and genetic control of inductions contributes to the counterintuitive inverse correlation between geometric and genetic variability during embryogenesis.