Latrophilin signaling links anterior-posterior tissue polarity and oriented cell divisions in the C. elegans embryo.

Tobias Langenhan, Simone Prömel, Lamia Mestek, Behrooz Esmaeili, Helen Waller-Evans, Christian Hennig, Yuji Kohara, Leon Avery, Ioannis Vakonakis, Ralf Schnabel, Andreas P Russ

Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QU, UK.

Developmental cell 2009 Oct

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Understanding the mechanisms that coordinate the orientation of cell division planes during embryogenesis and morphogenesis is a fundamental problem in developmental biology. Here we show that the orphan receptor lat-1, a homolog of vertebrate latrophilins, plays an essential role in the establishment of tissue polarity in the C. elegans embryo. We provide evidence that lat-1 is required for the alignment of cell division planes to the anterior-posterior axis and acts in parallel to known polarity and morphogenesis signals. lat-1 is a member of the Adhesion-GPCR protein family and is structurally related to flamingo/CELSR, an essential component of the planar cell polarity pathway. We dissect the molecular requirements of lat-1 signaling and implicate lat-1 in an anterior-posterior tissue polarity pathway in the premorphogenesis stage of C. elegans development.

Citation

Tobias Langenhan, Simone Prömel, Lamia Mestek, Behrooz Esmaeili, Helen Waller-Evans, Christian Hennig, Yuji Kohara, Leon Avery, Ioannis Vakonakis, Ralf Schnabel, Andreas P Russ. Latrophilin signaling links anterior-posterior tissue polarity and oriented cell divisions in the C. elegans embryo. Developmental cell. 2009 Oct;17(4):494-504