Real-time in vivo imaging of butterfly wing development: revealing the cellular dynamics of the pupal wing tissue.

ABSTRACT: Butterfly wings are covered with regularly arranged single-colored scales that are formed at the pupal stage. Understanding pupal wing development is therefore crucial to understand wing color pattern formation. Here, we successfully employed real-time in vivo imaging techniques to observe pupal hindwing development over time in the blue pansy butterfly, Junonia orithya. A transparent sheet of epithelial cells that were not yet regularly arranged was observed immediately after pupation. Bright-field imaging and autofluorescent imaging revealed free-moving hemocytes and tracheal branches of a crinoid-like structure underneath the epithelium. The wing tissue gradually became gray-white, epithelial cells were arranged regularly, and hemocytes disappeared, except in the bordering lacuna, after

SUBMITTER: Iwata M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3931798 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature