Midway through embryonic development in Drosophila melanogaster, the germband retracts to relocate the body segments to their final position. This process requires complex cell rearrangements and tissue-scale coordination, but the cellular behaviors and forces that drive it have not been characterized in detail.

This work shows that proper tissue retraction requires coordination between distinct supracellular actomyosin cables at the posterior-most segment of the germband: nonconstricting circumferential cables mechanically isolate cell subpopulations within the germband, and constricting cables accelerate overall tissue retraction.

Force propagation drives morphogenesis of a wide range of organs and tissues. This work provides a model to understand how forces are coordinated between adjacent tissues but also restrained to specific tissue compartments during development.

This preprint has been assigned the following badges: New Hypothesis, Cross-Validation, Open Data.

Read the preprint on bioRxiv (Nandi et al., 2022): https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.23.509113.