Imaging Morphogenesis: Technological Advances and Biological Insights

摘要

Our understanding of developmental processes relies fundamentally on their in vivo observation. Morphogenesis, the shaping of an organism by cell movements, cell-cell interactions, collective cell behavior, cell shape changes, cell divisions, and cell death, is a dynamic process on many scales, from fast subcellular rearrangements to slow structural changes at the whole-organism level. The ability to capture, simultaneously, the fast dynamic behavior of individual cells, as well as their system-level interactions over long periods of time, is crucial for an understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms. Arriving at a complete picture of morphogenesis requires not only observation of single-cell to tissue-level morphological dynamics, but also quantitative measurement of protein dynamics, changes in gene expression, and readouts of physical forces acting during development. Live-imaging approaches based on light microscopy are of key importance to obtaining such information at the system level and with high spatiotemporal resolution.