Abstract
How do tissues sense and respond to the changing shape of the growing embryo? We address this in the zebrafish embryo brain. A specialize epithelium forms the roof of the rhombencephalon; this is a squamous epithelium of single cell thickness composed of polygonal cells in a tensioned lattice. Its growth and shape are somehow integrated with the growth of the underlying neuroepithelium, but how this happens is unknown. Time-lapse in vivo imaging using cutting edge microscopy and computational models of deformable lattices with different mechanical properties will be used to determine the cellular, biomechanical and molecular mechanisms that accomplish this integrated growth.
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