New study published in Nature Communications

Nature Communications has published our recent work on multi-scale visualization of early zebrafish development this week. We have done this interdisciplinary project in close collaboration with Gopi Shah from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Barcelona, Spain and the lab of Jan Huisken at the Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, USA.

In this paper, we visualized and quantified the formation and dynamics of the three main cell populations (so-called germ layers) within a developing zebrafish embryo during one of the most fundamental periods of animal development, the gastrulation stage. We show that cell movements that mostly depend on the position of cells within the embryo establish a specific distribution of each germlayer during early gastrulation. The differences in initial germlayer distributions are subsequently amplified by a global movement, which organizes the organ precursors along the embryonic body axis, giving rise to the blueprint of organ formation.

The data can be interactively explored at https://imb-dev.gitlab.io/cell-flow-navigator.

Link to publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13625-0