Twisting Tubes

摘要

Various animal organs show left-right (LR) asymmetric morphology and need to be able to form tubes (see the Perspective by Horne-Badovinac and Munro). The fly hindgut consists of an epithelial tube that twists to the left during embryogenesis. Before this twist occurs, the epithelial cells of the tube adopt a LR asymmetric (chiral) cell shape within their inner (apical) plane. Taniguchi et al. (p. 339) refer to this novel cell behavior as "planar cell-shape chirality" (PCC). Drosophila E-Cadherin, an adhesion protein, and Myosin ID were asymmetrically distributed and were responsible for generating the PCC.