Caltech researchers get first look at how groups of cells coordinate their...(z axes but by looking at its cylindrical...)

What the data showed was that the mesodermal cells move in a directed manner, traveling down and moving outward--diverging--at the same time. The ectoderm, on the other hand, moves down but converges as it goes. Thus, the mesoderm--which sits atop the ectoderm--passively rides the downward wave of ectodermal movement, but has to actively swim against the tide to spread outward.

"It's as if the mesodermal cells are on a moving sidewalk," says Stathopoulos, "but as they're being moved along, they keep taking steps to the side."

The researchers found, in addition, that this choreography is anything but chaotic. The cells stayed in more or less the same order throughout their travels, following a set of "leader" cells and rarely if ever crossing over the midline of the pack.

"If you look at movies of the motion," says Stathopoulos, "you see all this jiggling, and you'd think the cells are mixing all around. And yet, they're not."

"We were able to follow the whole process," adds Scott Fraser, the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Biology, director of the Beckman Institute's Biological Imaging Center, and a paper coauthor. "We were able to label and watch the cells doing the motion, and the events that guide the motion."

In addition to looking at normal gastrulation, the scientists also looked at what happens to gastrulation when mutations occur. "We watched normal behavior, and the cues that guided it," says Fraser. "Then we could use the power of genetics to break one of the cues and analyze what was different, to determine how that cue was involved in the process. Being able to visualize groups of cells lets us do this in a more complex and powerful way. Before, you could say, 'It's broken.' Now, we can say how it is broken."

The findings turned up some other surprising tidbits a
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