Germ layer specific regulation of cell polarity and adhesion gives insight into the evolution of mesoderm.
Posted on: 26 April 2018 , updated on: 30 April 2018
Preprint posted on 20 March 2018
Article now published in eLife at http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.36740
Making a mesoderm: induced EMT-like events during Cnidarian gastrulation
Selected by Claire Simon & Sophie MorganiCategories: developmental biology, evolutionary biology
Background
In bilaterian animals (from worms to humans) gastrulation is the process whereby the three germ layers are formed: the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. However, for simpler dipoblastic animals such as cnidarians, only two germ layers are formed, the ectoderm and endomesoderm. Salinas-Saavedra et al. investigate the cellular mechanisms that may have evolved to generate distinct endoderm and mesoderm layers.
What we like about this pre-print
This pre-print investigates the development of the sea anemone N. vectensis. Using this simple model organism and clever genetic manipulations, Salinas-Saavedra et al. were able to probe and decouple the more complex cell specification and morphogenetic events that are not as easily studied in higher organisms.
Although N. vectensis normally do not undergo an epithelial-to-mesenchyme transition (EMT), overexpressing dominant negative Par3, CRISPR-Cas9 Par3 deletion, or ectopic Snail expression in the ectoderm all yielded mesenchymal cells. While this is not a normal physiological state, it demonstrates that Cnidarians have the capacity and cellular machinery to undergo gastrulation-like events similar to bilaterians.
This bottom-up approach reconstituting EMT-like processes in a primitive organism invokes the Richard Feynman philosophy – “What I cannot create, I do not understand”, and is a step towards a deeper mechanistic understanding of the morphogenetic events in gastrulation.
Open questions
An intriguing question arising from this study is, what is the nature of the mesenchymal cells? Are the induced differences purely morphological or do these cells exhibit additional mesoderm-associated properties that could allow insights into the conservation of fundamental gastrulation regulators?
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