Membrane traffic and morphogenesis of the neural tube

在早期发育过程中，胚胎产生了许多器官，其功能以管状结构为基础，例如血管、肾脏、气道、大脑和脊髓。我们对产生管状结构的细胞和分子机制的理解相当有限，大多数最好的理解来自于对培养的细胞和组织进行的实验，而不是在胚胎本身。我们建议研究斑马鱼胚胎中脑和脊髓管状结构的发育，因为这是一个系统，使我们既可以通过延时显微镜观察完整胚胎的这一过程，又可以通过相对简单的实验方法操纵这一过程。我们将特别分析细胞分裂在这一过程中的作用，因为我们之前已经表明，一种非常特殊的细胞分裂在这一过程中起着强大的作用。细胞分裂如何产生管状结构的分子细节将是我们工作的重点。这项工作很有趣，因为组织形状和形态的产生（在我们的案例中是管状结构）对胚胎发生至关重要，当这些过程被破坏时，就会出现严重和痛苦的人类胎儿畸形。

During early development embryos generate many organs whose functions are based on a tubular structure, for example blood vessels, kidneys, airways and the brain and spinal cord. Our understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that generate tubular structures are quite limited and most of the best understanding comes from experiments done on cells and tissues grown in culture rather than in the embryos themselves. We propose to study the development of the tubular structure of the brain and spinal cord in zebrafish embryos as this is a system that allows us to both watch via time-lapse microscopy this process in completely intact embryos and manipulate the process by relatively easy experimental methods. We will particularly analyse the way that cell division plays in this process as we have previously shown that a very specialized cell division plays a powerful role in this process. The molecular details of how cell division can generate a tubular structure will be the focus of our work. This work is interesting because the generation of tissue shape and form (in our case a tubular structure) is of fundamental importance to embryogenesis and severe and distressing human foetal deformities arise when these processes are disrupted.