Branching morphogenesis

Branching morphogenesis is an important mechanism of animal development yet, until recently, most details about this highly dynamic process have had to be inferred from fixed tissues.

Transgenic animals have been developped in which branching tubules express fluorescent proteins, enabling their morphogenesis to be studied dynamically using time-lapse microscopy.

The results have shown that branch emergence is highly variable, that sprouting tracheae and blood vessels guide themselves by filopodial projections, that branching morphogenesis can involve highly ordered cell rearrangements, and that branches are subject to intense remodelling.

Though they are very new, these fluorescent systems have already expanded our knowledge of branching morphogenesis; future work, in which fluorescence might be used to report processes in addition to anatomy, promises an even greater advance.

See also

 branching morphogenesis
 renal tubulogenesis

References

 Davies JA. Watching tubules glow and branch. Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2005 Aug;15(4):364-70. PMID: #15964757#

 Nelson WJ. Tube morphogenesis : closure, but many openings remain. Trends Cell Biol. 2003 Dec ;13(12):615-21. PMID : 14624839 [PubMed - in process]

 Rosario M, Birchmeier W. How to make tubes: signaling by the Met receptor tyrosine kinase. Trends Cell Biol. 2003 Jun;13(6):328-35. PMID: #12791299#

 Zegers MM, O'Brien LE, Yu W, Datta A, Mostov KE. Epithelial polarity and tubulogenesis in vitro. Trends Cell Biol. 2003 Apr ;13(4):169-76. PMID : #12667754#

 Buechner M. Tubes and the single C. elegans excretory cell. Trends Cell Biol. 2002 Oct;12(10):479-84. PMID: #12441252#

 Krasnow MA, Nelson WJ. Tube morphogenesis. Trends Cell Biol. 2002 Aug;12(8):351. No abstract available. PMID: #12191903#

 Hogan BL, Kolodziej PA. Organogenesis: molecular mechanisms of tubulogenesis. Nat Rev Genet. 2002 Jul;3(7):513-23. PMID: #12094229#