Our past experiments uncovered an essential function of the Wnt pathway in vertebrate axis determination and its equally important role in morphogenesis (Sokol et al., 1991; Sokol, 1996). We also studied molecular links between apical-basal and planar cell polarity (PCP) proteins (Dollar et al., 2005; Lake and Sokol, 2009; Chuykin et al., 2018, Chuykin et al., 2021). Using proximity biotinylation and live imaging, we investigate how different signaling pathways modulate actomyosin dynamics and vesicular trafficking during apical constriction and other morphogenetic processes (Itoh et al., 2021; Reis et al., 2021; Matsuda et al., 2022).

 We would like to learn how embryonic cells and tissues sense and respond to mechanical forces during morphogenesis. Mechanotransduction is a process, by which a mechanical cue is sensed by a molecular component of the cell, converted to a biochemical signal and used to affect various biological processes, from cell migration to cell lineage specification.  Our group continues to investigate how changes in planar cell polarity (PCP) alter collective cell movements in vertebrates including neural tube closure (Ossipova et al., 2014; Ossipova et al., 2015a,b).