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Published May 25, 2011 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Intercellular Bridges in Vertebrate Gastrulation

Abstract

The developing zebrafish embryo has been the subject of many studies of regional patterning, stereotypical cell movements and changes in cell shape. To better study the morphological features of cells during gastrulation, we generated mosaic embryos expressing membrane attached Dendra2 to highlight cellular boundaries. We find that intercellular bridges join a significant fraction of epiblast cells in the zebrafish embryo, reaching several cell diameters in length and spanning across different regions of the developing embryos. These intercellular bridges are distinct from the cellular protrusions previously reported as extending from hypoblast cells (1–2 cellular diameters in length) or epiblast cells (which were shorter). Most of the intercellular bridges were formed at pre-gastrula stages by the daughters of a dividing cell maintaining a membrane tether as they move apart after mitosis. These intercellular bridges persist during gastrulation and can mediate the transfer of proteins between distant cells. These findings reveal a surprising feature of the cellular landscape in zebrafish embryos and open new possibilities for cell-cell communication during gastrulation, with implications for modeling, cellular mechanics, and morphogenetic signaling.

Additional Information

© 2011 Caneparo et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received February 4, 2011; Accepted April 13, 2011; Published May 25, 2011. Editor: Vincent Laudet, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. Funding: LC is supported by the Caltech Biological Imaging Center and by iFReC. PP is supported by a German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) Postdoctoral Fellowship. WD is supported by a Caltech Rosen Scholar Fellowship for Biological Engineering. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We are very grateful to Le Trinh, and Sean Megason for sharing reagents and/or technical expertise, and Leigh Ann Fletcher for the zebrafish husbandry. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: LC PP SEF. Performed the experiments: LC PP WD. Analyzed the data: LC PP. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: LC PP WD. Wrote the paper: LC.

Attached Files

Published - Caneparo2011p14068PLoS_ONE.pdf

Supplemental Material - FigS1.tif

Supplemental Material - MovieS1.avi

Supplemental Material - MovieS2.avi

Supplemental Material - MovieS3.avi

Supplemental Material - MovieS4.avi

Supplemental Material - MovieS5.avi

Supplemental Material - MovieS6.avi

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August 19, 2023
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