Planar cell polarity-directed cell crawling drives polarized epithelial morphogenesis
Description
This dataset contains image analysis data and simulation results from Sharan et al., 2026. Summary: During epithelial morphogenesis, cell polarity aligns individual cell behaviors into collective motions that shape developing tissues. Here, we combine experiments with computational modeling to investigate how cell-scale forces oriented by planar cell polarity (PCP) direct the collective, counter-rotational cell flows that occur during hair placode morphogenesis. Unexpectedly, we find that junctional myosin and PCP protein localization are not co-correlated with junction shrinkage, indicating the role of PCP during placode polarization is not to direct apical neighbor exchanges. Instead, we find that PCP directs anterior-directed crawling of placode cells along the basal surface of the tissue through a mechanism that requires integrins and the cell-crawling regulator Rac1. Modeling the placode as a three-dimensional continuum viscoelastic fluid, we find that active forces from cell crawling at the basal surface are sufficient to generate the experimentally observed counter-rotational cell motion at the apical surface. Our results show an unexpected role for PCP in epithelial morphogenesis, centering the basal surface as the site of force generation.
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Institutions
- Princeton UniversityNew Jersey, Princeton