Nature Cell Biology4, 937 - 944 (2002)
Published online: 25 November 2002; | doi:10.1038/ncb882
Planar polarity and actin dynamics in the epidermis of Drosophila
Julia A. Kaltschmidt1, 3, Nicola Lawrence1, 3, Véronique Morel1, Tina Balayo1, Beatriz García Fernández2, Anne Pelissier1, Antonio Jacinto2
& Alfonso Martinez Arias1
1
Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EH, UK
2
Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Rua da Quinta Grande 6, 2780-156 Oeiras, Portugal
3
These authors contributed equally to this work
Correspondence should be addressed to Alfonso Martinez Arias ama11@cus.cam.ac.uk
Dorsal closure is a morphogenetic process involving the coordinated convergence of two epithelial sheets to enclose the Drosophila melanogaster embryo. Specialized populations of cells at the edges of each epithelial sheet, the dorsal-most epidermal cells, emit actin-based processes that are essential for the proper enclosure of the embryo. Here we show that actin dynamics at the leading edge is preceded by a planar polarization of the dorsal-most epidermal cells associated with a reorganization of the cytoskeleton. An important consequence of this planar polarization is the formation of actin-nucleating centres at the leading edge, which are important in the dynamics of actin. We show that Wingless (Wg) signalling and Jun amino-terminal kinase (JNK) signalling have overlapping but different roles in these events.
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