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Updated: May 23, 2026

Imaging and Analysis of Tissue Orientation and Growth Dynamics in the Developing Drosophila Epithelia During Pupal Stages
Published on: June 2, 2020
Mechanical control of morphogenesis by Fat/Dachsous/Four-jointed planar cell polarity pathway
Floris Bosveld1, Isabelle Bonnet, Boris Guirao
1Polarity, Division and Morphogenesis Team, Institut Curie, CNRS UMR 3215, INSERM U934, 26 Rue d'Ulm, 75248 Paris Cedex 05, France.
Abstract:
During animal development, several planar cell polarity (PCP) pathways control tissue shape by coordinating collective cell behavior. Here, we characterize by means of multiscale imaging epithelium morphogenesis in the Drosophila dorsal thorax and show how the Fat/Dachsous/Four-jointed PCP pathway controls morphogenesis. We found that the proto-cadherin Dachsous is polarized within a domain of its tissue-wide expression gradient. Furthermore, Dachsous polarizes the myosin Dachs, which in turn promotes anisotropy of junction tension. By combining physical modeling with quantitative image analyses, we determined that this tension anisotropy defines the pattern of local tissue contraction that contributes to shaping the epithelium mainly via oriented cell rearrangements. Our results establish how tissue planar polarization coordinates the local changes of cell mechanical properties to control tissue morphogenesis.
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