神马福利影片

Abstract: o How does a uniform population of cells transform into a beating heart, a gut, a brain? The cellular and mechanical processes driving early mammalian organ formation remain poorly understood, largely because mammalian embryos are incredibly sensitive to imaging and culture. We have developed an adaptive light-sheet microscope purpose-built for the requirements of the post-implantation mouse embryo, enabling single-cell resolution imaging across days of development. Paired with computational tools for cell tracking, fate mapping, and 3D reconstruction, this platform lets us observe morphogenesis in real time, across the whole embryo. We first applied this system to the journey of primordial germ cells (PGCs), founders of the germline that must navigate rapidly changing tissue environments as the embryo reorganizes around them. We reveal that PGCs migrate heterogeneously, dynamically adapting their behaviour to the distinct extra-cellular matrix compositions and physical landscapes they encounter. We then focus on ventral folding and foregut formation. Through live imaging and computational reconstruction of the folding process, we uncover striking and previously undescribed cellular behaviours, revealing the precise choreography driving one of the embryo's earliest organogenesis events.

Biography: o Kate McDole is a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Her lab explores the morphogenesis of the early mouse embryo using a combination of advanced light-sheet microscopy, biology, computational methods and biophysics. Kate did her PhD at Johns Hopkins at the Carnegie Institute for Science鈥檚 Department of Embryology in the lab of Yixian Zheng, using two-photon microscopy to study early cell fate establishment in the pre-implantation mouse embryo. She moved to HHMI鈥檚 Janelia Research Campus to do her post-doc in the lab of Philipp Keller, developing a light-sheet microscope for imaging post-implantation mouse development.