Planar cell polarity (PCP) is the aligned cell polarity within a tissue plane. Mechanical signals are known to act as a global cue for PCP, yet their exact role is still unclear. In this study, we focused on PCP in the posterior neuroectoderm of Xenopus laevis and investigated how mechanical signals regulate polarity. We revealed that the neuroectoderm is under a larger tension in the anterior-posterior direction and that perturbation of this tension caused PCP disappearance. We showed that application of uniaxial stretch to explant tissues could control the orientation of PCP and that cells sense the tissue stretch indirectly through a change in their shape rather than directly through detection of anisotropic tension. Furthermore, we revealed that PCP was most strongly established when the orientation of tissue stretch coincided with that of diffusion of locally expressed Wnt ligands, suggesting a cooperative relationship between these two PCP regulators.
Alignment of cell long axis by unidirectional tension acts cooperatively with Wnt signalling to establish PCP
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