Fine intercellular connections in development: TNTs, cytonemes, or intercellular bridges?

Authors:

Olga Korenkova1,2, Anna Pepe1 and Chiara Zurzolo1
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Affiliations:

1 Unit of Membrane Traffic and Pathogenesis, Institut Pasteur, 28 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France.

2 Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405 Orsay, France.

Keywords: 

tunneling nanotubes, TNTs, cytonemes, intercellular bridges, intercellular communication.

Abbreviatons:

Dpp – Decapentaplegic,

EGF – epidermal growth factor,

EPS – EGF receptor pathway substrate,

FGF – fibroblast growth factor, Hh – hedgehog,

IB – intercellular bridge,

ICM – inner cell mass,

iTNT – individual TNT,

mTE – mural TE,

PCP – planar cell polarity,

PMC – primary mesenchyme cell,

Shh – sonic Hh,

TE – trophectoderm,

TNT – tunneling nanotube.

Corresponding Author(s):

Chiara Zurzolo, Unit of Membrane Traffic and Pathogenesis, Institut Pasteur, 28 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France; chiara.zurzolo@pasteur.fr

Conflict of interest statement:

The authors declare no conflict of interests.

Please cite this article as:

Olga Korenkova, Anna Pepe and Chiara Zurzolo (2020). Fine intercellular connections in development: TNTs, cytonemes, or intercellular bridges? Cell Stress 4(2): 30-43. doi: 10.15698/cst2020.02.212

© 2020 Korenkova et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Com-mons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unre-stricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medi-um, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.

Abstract:

Intercellular communication is a fundamental property of multicellular organisms, necessary for their adequate responses to changing environment. Tunneling nanotubes (TNTs) represent a novel means of intercellular communication being a long cell-to-cell conduit. TNTs are actively formed under a broad range of stresses and are also proposed to exist under physiological conditions. Development is a physiological condition of particular interest, as it requires fine coordination. Here we discuss whether protrusions shown to exist during embryonic development of different species could be TNTs or if they represent other types of cell structure, like cytonemes or intercellular bridges, that are suggested to play an important role in development.