Dataset for Wang et al. 2020: Reconstituting Stratified Epithelial Branching Morphogenesis by Engineering Cell Adhesion

This dataset can be used to reproduce all plots in Wang et al., 2020 manuscript titled: "Reconstituting Stratified Epithelial Branching Morphogenesis by Engineering Cell Adhesion" in combination with the Jupyter notebook scripts available from this Github repository: https://github.com/snownontrace/public-scripts-Wang2020-branching-morphogenesis.git<br><br>1. Download and decompress the dataset zip file.<br>2. Place the "data" folder and the "scripts" folder (from GitHub) in the same folder.<br> Note: This folder organization is necessary because relative path is used to read in data in all scripts (e.g., '../data/specific_data_folder/data_table').<br>3. Run scripts to reproduce plots of interest. Refer to the table in the README file of the Github repository to find out which scripts were used to generate which figures.<br>Abstract:During embryogenesis, many organs undergo branching morphogenesis to form tree-like hierarchical structures. However, it remains unclear what drives branching in stratified epithelia, such as in embryonic salivary gland and pancreas. Here, we performed live-organ imaging of mouse embryonic salivary glands at single-cell resolution to reveal branching driven by expansion and folding of an epithelial surface cell sheet characterized by strong cell-matrix adhesion and weak cell-cell adhesion. We successfully reconstituted this early developmental process by experimentally suppressing E-cadherin expression and inducing basement membrane formation in 3D spheroid cultures of engineered cells. Reconstituted branching required integrin-mediated cell-matrix adhesions and was promoted by elevating cell-matrix adhesion strength. Thus, stratified epithelial branching is driven by the combination of strong cell-matrix adhesion and weak cell-cell adhesion of peripheral epithelial cells.<br>