Most internal organs of all animals are tubes, such as lung, kidney, liver, intestine, and we study how tubes are formed during development, both in the fly embryo as well as in human kidney organoids, to uncover common and specific mechanisms.

This PhD project will build on previous findings from the lab that identified important cell behaviours and coordination of many cells that drives the bending of a flat sheet of cells into an invaginating tube in the salivary glands of the fly embryo. We want to understand what drives these behaviours and the coordination, especially how the cytoskeleton and cell-cell interactions are controlled. We know that the earliest physical changes are driven by transcription of effectors in a patterned and tightly controlled way. We have good candidates, but also recently generated a single cell-RNAseq dataset of the cells just beginning to form the tube. These will allow us to identify key players that generate forces within cells and help their coordination across the tissue.

In the project, you will use advanced live imaging methods, quantitative morphometric analyses as well as genetics to understand how the patterned transcription of morphogenetic effector proteins drives tube morphogenesis.

References

Sánchez-Corrales, Y. E., Blanchard, G. B., & Röper, K. (2021) Correct regionalisation of a tissue primordium is essential for coordinated morphogenesis. bioRxiv Preprint, 2020.08.29.273219

Gillard, G., Girdler, G. & Röper, K. (2021). A release-and-capture mechanism generates an essential non-centrosomal microtubule array during tube budding. Nature Communications1 2, 4096 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24332-0

Sidor, C., Stevens, T., Jin, L., Boulanger, J., Röper, K. (2020). Rho kinase planar polarisation at tissue boundaries depends on phospho-regulation of membrane residence time. Dev.Cell, 52(3), 364–378.e7 

Sánchez-Corrales, Y. E., & Röper, K. (2018). Alignment of cytoskeletal structures across cell boundaries generates tissue cohesion during organ formation. Current Opinion in Cell Biology, 55, 104–110. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ceb.2018.07.001

Sánchez-Corrales, Y. E., Blanchard, G. B., & Röper, K. (2018). Radially-patterned cell behaviours during tube budding from an epithelium. eLife, 7, e35717. http://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.35717

Sidor, C. and Röper, K. (2016), Genetic control of salivary gland tubulogenesis in Drosophila. in ‘Organogenetic Gene Networks’ pp 125-149, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42767-6_5, ISBN 978-3-319-42765-2