Inflationary theory of branching morphogenesis in the mouse salivary gland

Branching organization of the developing mouse salivary gland ductal epithelium

To gain insight into the mechanisms that control the large-scale organization of the salivary gland, we dissected, stained and imaged in 3d murine glands using confocal microscopy (see Methods). Here, attention was placed on the submandibular gland (SMG), the most well-studied of the three major salivary gland compartments. Glands were stained with Mucin 1 (Muc1) to visualize the ductal lumen²⁷, Mist1 to identify acini and DAPI to mark cell nuclei (Fig. 1b). From these images, we then manually segmented the…