Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2011 Oct;21(5):671-9. doi: 10.1016/j.gde.2011.08.002. Epub 2011 Sep 3.
Throughout the lifespan of an organism, shape changes are necessary for cells to carry out their essential functions. Nowhere is this more dramatic than embryonic development and gastrulation, when cell shape changes drive large-scale rearrangements in tissue architecture to establish the body plan of the organism. A longstanding question for both cell and developmental biologists has been how are forces generated to change cell shape? Recent studies in both cell culture and developing embryos have combined live imaging, computational analysis, genetics, and biophysics to identify ratchet-like behaviors in actomyosin networks that operate to incrementally change cell shape, drive cell movement, and deform tissues. Our analysis of several cell shape changes leads us to propose four regulatory modules associated with ratchet-like deformations that are tuned to generate diverse cell behaviors, coordinating cell shape change across a tissue.
在生物体的整个生命周期中，形状变化对于细胞执行其基本功能是必要的。在胚胎发育和原肠胚形成过程中，这种变化最为显著，此时细胞形状的变化会推动组织架构的大规模重新排列，从而建立生物体的体轴。对于细胞生物学家和发育生物学家来说，一个长期存在的问题是，细胞如何产生力来改变细胞的形状？最近在细胞培养和发育胚胎中的研究结合了实时成像、计算分析、遗传学和生物物理学，以鉴定肌动球蛋白网络中的棘轮样行为，这些行为可逐步改变细胞形状、驱动细胞运动并使组织变形。我们对几种细胞形状变化的分析使我们提出了与棘轮样变形相关的四个调节模块，这些模块被调整以产生不同的细胞行为，协调组织中的细胞形状变化。
