Source Data for Wang et al. 2021: Epithelial Morphogenesis Driven by Cell-Matrix vs. Cell-Cell Adhesion

This dataset can be used to reproduce all plots in Wang et al., 2021 titled: "Epithelial Morphogenesis Driven by Cell-Matrix vs. Cell-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:Many embryonic organs undergo epithelial morphogenesis to form tree-like hierarchical structures. However, it remains unclear what drives the budding and branching of 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 that budding morphogenesis is driven by expansion and folding of a distinct epithelial surface cell sheet characterized by strong cell-matrix adhesions and weak cell-cell adhesions. Profiling of single-cell transcriptomes of this epithelium revealed spatial patterns of transcription underlying these cell adhesion differences. We then synthetically reconstituted budding morphogenesis by experimentally suppressing E-cadherin expression and inducing basement membrane formation in 3D spheroid cultures of engineered cells, which required β1 integrin-mediated cell-matrix adhesion for successful budding. Thus, stratified epithelial budding, the key first step of branching morphogenesis, is driven by an overall combination of strong cell-matrix adhesion and weak cell-cell adhesion by peripheral epithelial cells.<br>