First authors Teng Teng and Camilla Teng publish paper on tissue fusion

Congratulations go to post-doctoral fellows Teng Teng and Camilla Teng, who are co-first authors on a new paper on secondary palate fusion published in the journal Development. Tissue fusion, where two distinct tissues come togeher and fuse to become one, is common to many different developmental systems and is particularly important for craniofacial development, where its perturbation can result in the common conditions cleft lip and palate. In this paper, we develop a new imaging approach to visualize the process of secondary palate fusion. Specificially, how is the epithelium that is trapped between the two secondary palatal shelves removed with proper timing to allow these two structures to become one? Teng and Camilla discovered a novel and unique mode of collective migration that is crucial for this process. This colective migration is dependent on epithelial actoymyosin contractility, and is sufficient for secondary palate fusion even in the absence of apoptosis. This study addresses long-standing questions in the field of craniofacial biology and reveals an exciting new context and approach for the study of basic mechanisms of collective epithelial migration, which is also highly relevant to various forms of cancer. This work was generously supported by R35DE031926 and by R01DE025877 from NIH/NIDCR.