The development of multicellular organisms is achieved through the coordinated progression of diverse cellular events, such as cell proliferation, differentiation, adhesion, migration, and cell death.
For example, programmed cell death plays an essential role in tissue formation during development by eliminating selected cells, and it also maintains homeostasis in adult organisms by removing abnormal cells. Accordingly, defects in normal cell death signaling can disrupt homeostasis and are thought to contribute not only to developmental abnormalities, but also to diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration.
In the cellular society of an organism, cell death is increasingly recognized not only as a mechanism for eliminating cells at specific places and times, but also as a process that influences diverse cellular functions in neighboring cells, including the regulation of cell proliferation and migration.
Such cellular behaviors are considered to establish intercellular networks that orchestrate tissue formation. To understand these dynamic systems, it is important to employ experimental approaches that incorporate spatiotemporal information in vivo. Live imaging, which enables real-time visualization of biological events within living organisms, provides a particularly powerful strategy.
We employ the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a powerful model organism for developmental biology with extensive genetic resources, to investigate how diverse cellular behaviors underlying tissue formation are coordinated. Our research combines live imaging with genetic screening to reveal the dynamic mechanisms that organize cells during development.
By leveraging the rich genetic toolkit of Drosophila together with advanced in vivo imaging technologies, we visualize and comprehensively capture the behavior of individual cells within living organisms—processes that have long been difficult to analyze. Through these approaches, we seek to elucidate the intercellular network systems that enable tissue formation.
Fig. 1
Dorsal (left) and ventral (right) views of a Drosophila pupa with posterior expression of intracellular fluorescent proteins in each body part. The yellow box marks the male external genitalia.
Fig. ２
Male posterior abdomen showing cells in the lower region highlighted in green.