Membrane traffic and morphogenesis of the neural tube

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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.