Key result
BMP signaling and the actomyosin cytoskeleton promote constriction of the dorsal pericardium, enabling proepicardial cells to extrude apically during zebrafish heart development.
Why the study?
Little is known about how the proepicardium emerges from the pericardial mesothelium during heart development.
This study identifies apical cell extrusion, driven by BMP signaling and actin dynamics, as the mechanism by which proepicardial cells emerge to form the epicardium during heart development.
The epicardium, the outer mesothelial layer enclosing the myocardium, plays key roles in heart development and regeneration. During embryogenesis it arises from the proepicardium (PE), a cell cluster that appears in the dorsal pericardium (DP) close to the venous pole of the heart. Little is known about how the PE emerges from the pericardial mesothelium. Using the zebrafish model and a combination of genetic tools, pharmacological agents and quantitative in vivo imaging, we reveal that a coordinated collective movement of DP cells drives PE formation. We found that BMP signaling and the actomyosin cytoskeleton promote constriction of the DP, which enabled PE cells to extrude apically. We provide evidence that cell extrusion, which has been described in the elimination of unfit cells from epithelia and the emergence of hematopoietic stem cells, is also a mechanism for PE cells to exit an organized mesothelium and fulfil the developmental fate to form a new tissue layer, the epicardium.
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Andrés‐Delgado et al. (2019) studied Heart development. BMP signaling and actomyosin cytoskeleton was evaluated on Proepicardial cell extrusion. BMP signaling and the actomyosin cytoskeleton promote constriction of the dorsal pericardium, enabling proepicardial cells to extrude apically during zebrafish heart development.
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