Going your own way: Self-guidance mechanisms in cell migration.

How cells and tissues migrate from one location to another is a question of significant biological and medical relevance. Migration is generally thought to be controlled by external hardwired guidance cues, which cells follow by polarizing their internal locomotory machinery in the imposed direction. However, a number of recently discovered 'self-guidance' mechanisms have revealed that migrating cells have more control over the path they follow than previously thought.

An image-based data-driven analysis of cellular architecture in a developing tissue.

Quantitative microscopy is becoming increasingly crucial in efforts to disentangle the complexity of organogenesis, yet adoption of the potent new toolbox provided by modern data science has been slow, primarily because it is often not directly applicable to developmental imaging data. We tackle this issue with a newly developed algorithm that uses point cloud-based morphometry to unpack the rich information encoded in 3D image data into a straightforward numerical representation. This enabled us to employ data science tools, including machine learning, to analyze and integrate cell morphology, intracellular organization, gene expression and annotated contextual knowledge.

Getting back on track: exploiting canalization to uncover the mechanisms of developmental robustness.

Developing embryos can adapt dynamically to noise and variation to generate organs of incredible precision, a process termed 'canalization'; however, the underlying robustness mechanisms are poorly understood. Technological developments, both in quantitative imaging and high precision perturbation, are now enabling targeted investigation into developmental robustness in vivo. Here, we will first distil the common design features of studies that have exploited the canalization behaviour of specific systems to interrogate developmental adaptation, to provide a general experimental framework for future investigations in other contexts.

Dynamic Buffering of Extracellular Chemokine by a Dedicated Scavenger Pathway Enables Robust Adaptation during Directed Tissue Migration.

How tissues migrate robustly through changing guidance landscapes is poorly understood. Here, quantitative imaging is combined with inducible perturbation experiments to investigate the mechanisms that ensure robust tissue migration in vivo. We show that tissues exposed to acute "chemokine floods" halt transiently before they perfectly adapt, i.

The golgin coiled-coil proteins capture different types of transport carriers via distinct N-terminal motifs.

Background: The internal organization of cells depends on mechanisms to ensure that transport carriers, such as vesicles, fuse only with the correct destination organelle. Several types of proteins have been proposed to confer specificity to this process, and we have recently shown that a set of coiled-coil proteins on the Golgi, called golgins, are able to capture specific classes of carriers when relocated to an ectopic location.

Results: Mapping of six different golgins reveals that, in each case, a short 20-50 residue region is necessary and sufficient to capture specific carriers.

Membrane trafficking. The specificity of vesicle traffic to the Golgi is encoded in the golgin coiled-coil proteins.

The Golgi apparatus is a multicompartment central sorting station at the intersection of secretory and endocytic vesicular traffic. The mechanisms that permit cargo-loaded transport vesicles from different origins to selectively access different Golgi compartments are incompletely understood. We developed a rerouting and capture assay to investigate systematically the vesicle-tethering activities of 10 widely conserved golgin coiled-coil proteins.