The inward folding, or invagination, of epithelial tissues is an important morphogenetic phenomenon, converting flat sheets of cells into three-dimensional tissues.
Takefumi Kondo and his team from the Center for Developmental Biology have shown that a process known as mitotic rounding drives the invagination of the tracheal placode in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
This work shows that mitosis plays an unsuspected role in this form of developmental tissue remodeling.
More information about this can be found on the CDB website. The study is published in the journal Nature, doi:10.1038/nature11792