Program in Biophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Curr Top Dev Biol. 2009;89:87-114. doi: 10.1016/S0070-2153(09)89004-2.
Epithelia are sheets of tightly adherent cells that line both internal and external surfaces in a vast array of metazoans. During development, an intrinsic consequence of coupling tight adhesion with cellular proliferation is the emergence of an epithelial form characterized by a stereotyped distribution of polygonal cell shapes. Despite the near universality of this constraint on cell shape and tissue organization, very little is known about the possible implications of cell pattern geometry for mechanical properties of tissues or key biological processes, such as planar polarization, tissue remodeling, and cell division. In this chapter, through an examination of increasingly complex models, we highlight what is known about the role of mitotic proliferation in the emergence of epithelial cell geometry, and examine some possible implications for tissue morphogenesis. Ideally, continued progress in this area will address a major conceptual challenge in biology, which is to understand aspects of morphogenesis that are not explicitly directed by genetic control, but instead emerge from the complex interactions between geometric and biomechanical properties of epithelial tissues.
上皮组织是一层紧密附着的细胞，广泛存在于后生动物的内外表面。在发育过程中，紧密黏附与细胞增殖相结合的内在结果是出现了一种上皮形式，其特征是多边形细胞形状的规则分布。尽管这种对细胞形状和组织的限制具有普遍性，但对于细胞模式几何形状对组织力学特性或关键生物学过程（如平面极化、组织重塑和细胞分裂）的可能影响，我们知之甚少。在这一章中，我们通过对越来越复杂的模型的研究，强调了有丝分裂增殖在上皮细胞几何形状出现中的作用，并探讨了其对组织形态发生的一些可能影响。理想情况下，这一领域的持续进展将解决生物学中的一个主要概念挑战，即理解形态发生的某些方面不是由遗传控制明确指导的，而是从上皮组织的几何和生物力学特性之间的复杂相互作用中出现的。
