During animal development, several planar cell polarity (PCP) pathways control tissue shape by coordinating collective cell behavior. Here, we characterize by means of multiscale imaging epithelium morphogenesis in the Drosophila dorsal thorax and show how the Fat/Dachsous/Four-jointed PCP pathway controls morphogenesis. We found that the proto-cadherin Dachsous is polarized within a domain of its tissue-wide expression gradient. Furthermore, Dachsous polarizes the myosin Dachs, which in turn promotes anisotropy of junction tension. By combining physical modeling with quantitative image analyses, we determined that this tension anisotropy defines the pattern of local tissue contraction that contributes to shaping the epithelium mainly via oriented cell rearrangements. Our results establish how tissue planar polarization coordinates the local changes of cell mechanical properties to control tissue morphogenesis.

Lamins are the main components of the nucleoskeleton. Whereas their 3D organization was recently described using cryoelectron tomography, no structural data highlights how they interact with their partners at the interface between the inner nuclear envelope and chromatin. A large number of mutations causing rare genetic disorders called laminopathies were identified in the C-terminal globular Igfold domain of lamins A and C. We here present a first structural description of the interaction between the lamin A/C immunoglobulin-like domain and emerin, a nuclear envelope protein. We reveal that this lamin A/C domain both directly binds self-assembled emerin and interacts with monomeric emerin LEM domain through the dimeric chromatin-associated Barrier-to-Autointegration Factor (BAF) protein. Mutations causing autosomal recessive progeroid syndromes specifically impair proper binding of lamin A/C domain to BAF, thus destabilizing the link between lamin A/C and BAF in cells. Recent data revealed that, during nuclear assembly, BAF’s ability to bridge distant DNA sites is essential for guiding membranes to form a single nucleus around the mitotic chromosome ensemble. Our results suggest that BAF interaction with lamin A/C also plays an essential role, and that mutations associated with progeroid syndromes leads to a dysregulation of BAF-mediated chromatin organization and gene expression.