Recent Highlights
Epithelial tissue, this study suggests, behaves less like a uniform sheet of rubber and more like a patchwork quilt, with individual Xenopus cells stretching to very different degrees even when the whole explant is pulled by the same amount. By tying that uneven strain to each cell’s own material properties and showing that forces run mainly through medio-apical actomyosin while junctional networks shed and remodel them, the work points to a built‑in mechanical diversity that helps epithelia stay both robust and adaptable during morphogenesis.
J. Yang, Y. Dong, C. B. Jones, Y. Wang, C. V. Merino, C. Stuckenholz, L. A Davidson (in review). Shape, Strain, and Stability: Epithelia Under High Strain. BioRxiv. link
After gastrulation, the Xenopus tailbud comes into view as a kind of mechanical engine, driving paired, counter-rotating flows of tissue around the blastopore that stretch the embryo dorsally while squeezing it ventrally. High-resolution imaging and perturbations point to a ventrally organized fibronectin–laminin scaffold as the hidden flywheel behind these rotations, a newly appreciated extracellular matrix network that mechanically links dorsal and ventral tissues to choreograph large-scale morphogenetic flow.
G. Masak and L. A Davidson (in review). Supracellular Mechanics and Counter-Rotational Bilateral Flows Orchestrate Posterior Morphogenesis. BioRxiv. link
This study asks how far one can get by treating tissue movies as mechanical clues, using simulations and image analysis to read out not just that convergent extension is happening, but which forces are doing the work. By building a minimal epithelial model that can undergo convergent extension passively or through three active modes—crawling, contraction, and capture—and then creating a “Mechanism Index” to match simulations to Xenopus, mouse, and fly timelapses, the authors turn live imaging into a kind of fingerprinting tool for teasing apart when cells are being pulled along, when they are powering the motion, and how those strategies vary across the neural plate and between species.
S. Anjum, D. Vijayraghavan, Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalez, Ann Sutherland, and L. A Davidson (in review). Inferring active and passive mechanical drivers of epithelial convergent extension. BioRxiv. link
Epithelial cells, the living tiles that line embryos and organs, are shown here to snap into a brief, coordinated contraction when bathed in nucleotides released from wounds, with ATP and UTP emerging as the main chemical alarms. The work traces this response to the purinergic receptor P2Y2 and its G‑protein partners, which drive actomyosin assembly, and shows that when this pathway is blocked, the epithelium can no longer contract in the face of injury signals.
S. D. Joshi*, T. J. Jackson*, L. Zhang, C. Stuckenholz, and L. A. Davidson (2025). Supracellular contractility in Xenopus embryo epithelia regulated by extracellular ATP and the purinergic receptor P2Y2. Journal of Cell Science, 138, jcs263877. link
Viscoelasticity - the way tissues act both like solids and liquids - is a basic, but often overlooked, feature of how embryos build bodies. It explains how cells and tissues use viscoelastic behavior to absorb and transmit mechanical forces during morphogenesis and organ formation, surveys tools for measuring these properties, and presents mathematical models that can capture this complex behavior.
Y. Dong, S. Maiti, and L. A Davidson (2025) Viscoelasticity during development: What is it? and why should you care? Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology, vol. 175: Elsevier. link
Animals must endure not just heat waves and polar cold, but crushing pressures in the deep sea; here we argue that these seemingly different extremes create strikingly similar biochemical problems. By proposing that cold and high pressure disrupt biology through comparable mechanisms, we suggest that decades of work on cold adaptation may illuminate how life survives—and thrives—under immense hydrostatic pressure.
M. E. Corkins,T. R. Shaw, J. Chen, S. A. Sarles, Y. Hu, and L. A Davidson (2025) 'Similar biomolecular constraints drive convergent adaptation to extreme cold and high pressure', Integrative and comparative biology 65(3): 585-595. link
Cytokinesis in an epithelium emerges here as a delicate tug-of-war in which the contractile ring pulls a furrow inward while stiff, contractile neighbors push back, so that even small shifts in this balance—tuned by junctional reinforcement, optogenetic control, and mechanotransduction—can speed or stall division, scramble cell packing, and leak the barrier.
J. Landino, E. Misterovich, S. Chumki, L. Van den Goor, B. Adhikary, L. A. Davidson, and A. L. Miller (2025). Neighbor cells restrain furrowing during vertebrate epithelial cytokinesis. Developmental Cell, S1534.
Mechanical strain quietly shapes tissues from the embryo to the diseased organ, but has been hard to probe in living samples over large, realistic deformations. In this work, we introduce the TissueTractor, a high-strain stretcher that doubles tissue length while capturing high-resolution cell and filament remodeling in Xenopus explants, endothelial monolayers, and beating cardiomyocytes, opening a clearer window onto how force sculpts form and function.
J. Yang, E. Hearty, Y. Wang, D. S. Vijayraghavan, T. Walter, S. Anjum, C. Stuckenholz, Y.-W. Chen, S. Balasubramanian, Y. Dong, A. V. Kwiatkowski, and L. A. Davidson (2025). The TissueTractor: a device for applying large strains to tissues and cells for simultaneous high- resolution live cell microscopy. Small Methods, 2500136. link
Epithelial sheets maintain homeostasis through a range of mechanisms including cell rearrangement, extrusion, division, and intercalation. Working in collaboration with Dr. George Eisenhoffer’s group we developed a computational model of cell extrusion that recapitulates the biophysics of intrinsic and extrinsic contributors to extrusion.
S. Anjum, L. Turner, Y. Atieh, G. Eisenhoffer*, and L. A. Davidson* (2024). Assessing mechanical agency during apical apoptotic extrusion. iScience. 10.1016/j.isci.2024.111017. PMCID: PMC11539584. link
A summary of generic mechanisms that shape embryonic tissues.
L. A Davidson (2024) Gears of life: A primer on the simple machines that shape the embryo. Current Topics in Developmental Biology. 160, 87-109. link
Endothelial cells respond to ligand BMP9/BMP10 by polarizing and migrating against blood flow. To investigate the interaction between ligand signaling and fluid flow Ya-Wen Cheng and collaborators from the Roman and Hinck labs applied microfluidics and automated imaging to simultaneously image cells exposed to multiple shear stresses and multiple concentrations of ligand.
Y.-W. Cheng, A. R. Anzell, S. A. Morosky, T. A. Schwartze, C. S. Hinck, A. P. Hinck, B. L. Roman*, and L. A. Davidson* (2024). Shear stress and sub-femtomolar levels of ligand synergize to activate ALK1 signaling in endothelial cells. Cells, 13(3), 285. PMID: 38334677, PMCID: PMC10854672. link
A review with Geneva Masak focused on the mechanisms that integrate morphogenetic processes shaping the tailbud with anatomy shaped during gastrulation.
G. Masak and L. A. Davidson (2023). Constructing the pharyngula: connecting the primary axis of the head with the posterior axis of the tail. Cells and Development. link
Migratory streams of the neural crest move throughout the embryo. Along their paths they use and modify adhesive substrates in the extracellular matrix. Duncan Martinson and collaborators at Oxford University and Stowers Institute developed an agent based model to explore the role these interactions play in shaping cohesion and dispersion of these streams.
D. Martinson, R. McLennan, J. M. Teddy, M. C. McKinney, L. A. Davidson, R. E. Baker, H. M. Byrne, P. M. Kulesa, P. K. Maini (2023). Dynamic fibronectin assembly and remodeling by leader neural crest cells prevents jamming in collective cell migration. eLife. link
Directed cell rearrangement in the neural ectoderm is patterned by the emergence of planar cell polarity (PCP) proteins in the early gastrula. PCP factors are dynamically positioned and redistributed within the apical junctional complex of the prospective neural epithelium. What guides these movements remains a mystery. The manuscript by Chih-Wen Chu suggests myosin II motors are key to those movements, but not as a motor cargo.
C.-W. Chu and L. A. Davidson (in revision). Myosin-dependent partitioning of junctional Prickle2 toward the anterior vertex during planar polarization of Xenopus neuroectoderm. BioRxiv. link
Three protocols for making various Xenopus explants. Unlike organoids, these explants preserve the structure of embryonic tissues and allow cells to be cultured in a near-native microenvironment.
Davidson, L.A. (2022). Microsurgical methods to isolate and culture the early gastrula dorsal marginal zone. Cold Spring Harbor Protocols. link
Davidson, L.A. (2022). Microsurgical methods to make the Keller sandwich explant and the dorsal isolate. Cold Spring Harbor Protocols. link
Davidson, L.A. (2022). Microsurgical Manipulations to Isolate Collectively Migrating Mesendoderm. Cold Spring Harbor Protocols. link
See the accompanying Youtube Videos.
The gene Furry, a member of the planar cell polarity (PCP) complex, regulates gastrulation movements in Xenopus. Aileen Cervino from the Cirio group and collaborators at the Universidad de Buenos Aires characterized functional changes in cell behavior and morphogenesis defective in PCP signaling.
Cervino, A.S., Moretti, B., Stuckenholz, C., Grecco, H.E., Davidson, L.A., and Cirio, M.C. (2021). Furry is required for cell movements during gastrulation and functionally interacts with NDR1. Scientific reports 11, 1-17. link
C-Cadherin (Cdh3) regulates cell migration and contact inhibition of locomotion (CIL) through Rac and does not involve or require the formation of cell-cell adhesions. Surprising global regulation of Rac activity by classical mutant forms of C-cadherin lacking the extracellular or intracellular domains. See the accompanying videos of Rac-FRET in migrating Xenopus mesendoderm cells.
Ichikawa, T., Stuckenholz, C., and Davidson, L.A. (2020). Non-junctional role of Cadherin3 in cell migration and contact inhibition of locomotion via domain-dependent, opposing regulation of Rac1. Sci Rep 10, 17326. link
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