Use of Optogenetics to Interrogate Tissue Morphogenesis and Patterning During Development

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Michael Smutny

University of Warwick, Warwick Medical School

Dr. Michael Smutny is a cell and developmental biologist and Assistant Professor at the division of Biomedical Sciences at Warwick Medical School (WMS) and a member of the Centre of Mechanochemical Cell Biology (CMCB). Dr. Smutny received his PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Vienna in 2006 working on DNA tumour virus antigens in the lab of Prof. Erhard Wintersberger. He did his postdoctoral research as an Erwin Schroedinger Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland (2006-2010) with Prof. Alpha Yap studying cell-cell adhesion during tissue homeostasis and at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (2011-2017) with Prof. Carl-Philipp Heisenberg working on the role of cell and tissue mechanics in zebrafish development. Dr. Smutny and his lab are currently interested to understand mechanochemical feedback mechanisms regulating morphogenesis and cell fate specification during tissue formation in the early zebrafish embryo.

Daniel Čapek

University of Konstanz

Dr. Daniel Čapek is an evolutionary developmental biologist. He received his PhD from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, where he was developing and applying optogenetic chimeric receptors to investigate the Wnt/PCP pathway in the lab of Prof. Carl-Philipp Heisenberg. He is currently doing postdoctoral research as an Erwin Schroedinger Fellow at the Friedrich Miescher laboratory of the Max Planck Society Tübingen and the University of Konstanz with Prof. Patrick Müller. He uses fluorescence imaging, mathematical modeling, and computer-vision-assisted phenomics to understand the effect of ecological factors on development.

Collection Overview

The proposed edition will focus on the value of optogenetics as a new precision tool to explore diverse processes that regulate tissue and organ formation on multiple scales during embryonic development. Optogenetics has emerged as ideal non-invasive tool in cell and developmental biology to probe complex systems such as molecular and cellular interactions and protein functions by light illumination. Tunable control over power and frequency of the light input makes optogenetic approaches particularly efficient to study critical events in development that rely on precise spatiotemporal regulation of developmental programs. Previous studies provide excellent examples of how temporal modulation of photoactivation can reveal new insights into processes that regulate shapes and patterns of dynamic tissues in the embryo. This includes manipulation of tissue expression patterns by modulating ligand or receptor activities, reconstructing cell and tissue morphogenesis by tuning actomyosin contractility, interfering with the functional integrity of tissues by perturbation of cell adhesion complexes and controlling cell motility through modulating signaling inputs for coordinated collective migration. This collection will focus on similar recent advances in optogenetic approaches that modulate specific signaling pathways involved in cell and tissue morphogenesis and patterning in the developing embryo.