Emergence of a geometric pattern of cell fates from tissue-scale mechanics in the Drosophila eye
- Northwestern University, United States
Abstract
Pattern formation of biological structures involves the arrangement of different types of cells in an ordered spatial configuration. In this study, we investigate the mechanism of patterning the Drosophila eye epithelium into a precise triangular grid of photoreceptor clusters called ommatidia. Previous studies had led to a long-standing biochemical model whereby a reaction-diffusion process is templated by recently formed ommatidia to propagate a molecular prepattern across the eye. Here, we find that the templating mechanism is instead, mechanochemical in origin; newly born columns of differentiating ommatidia serve as a template to spatially pattern flows that move epithelial cells into position to form each new column of ommatidia. Cell flow is generated by a source and sink, corresponding to narrow zones of cell dilation and contraction respectively, that straddle the growing wavefront of ommatidia. The newly formed lattice grid of ommatidia cells are immobile, deflecting and focusing the flow of other cells. Thus, the self-organization of a regular pattern of cell fates in an epithelium is mechanically driven.
Data availability
All imaging data has been deposited in Dryad (doi:10.5061/dryad.f4qrfj6wp).
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Emergence of a geometric pattern of cell fates from tissue-scale mechanics in the Drosophila eyeDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.f4qrfj6wp.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R35GM118144)
- Richard W Carthew
National Science Foundation (1764421)
- Madhav Mani
- Richard W Carthew
Simons Foundation (597491)
- Madhav Mani
- Richard W Carthew
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Gallagher et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Emergence of a geometric pattern of cell fates from tissue-scale mechanics in the Drosophila eye
eLife 11:e72806.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72806
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