Fig. 1. C. elegans gastrulation. (A) Early embryonic lineage of C. elegans development. Daughters are annotated `a' for anterior, `p' for posterior, `l' for left, and `r' for right. Anterior is towards the left. The endoderm precursors, Ea and Ep, are labeled in blue. The neighboring cells that close the gastrulation cleft are in green (ABplpa, ABplpp, MSap, MSpa, MSpp and P₄). The scale on the left refers to time, in minutes, since fertilization. (B) Confocal images of lateral view of gastrulating embryos labeled with the membrane marker SynaptoRed to better visualize cell boundaries. Ea and Ep ingress towards the center of the embryo, and are eventually surrounded by MSap and P₄. Asterisks indicate Ea and Ep and neighboring cells are labeled with arrows in B-D. (C,D) Panels show DIC time-lapse views of gastrulation. (C) Lateral view of gastrulation, similar to B. Images are at 10 minute intervals. (D) Ventral view of gastrulation. From left to right, time intervals are 0, 12 and 32 minutes. As Ea and Ep `sink' into the embryo, six cells close up the ventral cleft. Note that while ABplpa and ABplpp start moving toward the cleft, they divide and the posterior daughters of these cells finish the movement. In this and all figures, embryos are oriented anterior towards the left, and posterior towards the right. Scale bars: 10 µm. Movies of time-lapse images are available online at http://dev.biologists.org/supplemental/.

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