Latrophilin signaling links anterior-posterior tissue polarity and oriented cell divisions in the C. elegans embryo.

Understanding the mechanisms that coordinate the orientation of cell division planes during embryogenesis and morphogenesis is a fundamental problem in developmental biology. Here we show that the orphan receptor lat-1, a homolog of vertebrate latrophilins, plays an essential role in the establishme...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Langenhan, T, Prömel, S, Mestek, L, Esmaeili, B, Waller-Evans, H, Hennig, C, Kohara, Y, Avery, L, Vakonakis, I, Schnabel, R, Russ, A
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: 2009
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Summary:Understanding the mechanisms that coordinate the orientation of cell division planes during embryogenesis and morphogenesis is a fundamental problem in developmental biology. Here we show that the orphan receptor lat-1, a homolog of vertebrate latrophilins, plays an essential role in the establishment of tissue polarity in the C. elegans embryo. We provide evidence that lat-1 is required for the alignment of cell division planes to the anterior-posterior axis and acts in parallel to known polarity and morphogenesis signals. lat-1 is a member of the Adhesion-GPCR protein family and is structurally related to flamingo/CELSR, an essential component of the planar cell polarity pathway. We dissect the molecular requirements of lat-1 signaling and implicate lat-1 in an anterior-posterior tissue polarity pathway in the premorphogenesis stage of C. elegans development.