Academia Sinica Logo

【Abstract】

During the development of early larval stage, the superficial epithelial cells of zebrafish undergo a special type of cell division called the asynthetic fission, in which the nuclear DNA is not replicated at all. The occurrence of asynthetic fission correlates to mechanical cues, such as growth rates of the body and chemical perturbation to the mechanosensing ion channel Piezo1. In this talk I will demonstrate that this cell division process can be prompted by locally stretching the superficial epithelium on a living fish, and why understanding the mechanism behind the asynthetic fission is extremely important for biophysics and biology.