Tissue elongation is a fundamental component of developing and regenerating systems. Although localised proliferation is an important mechanism for tissue elongation, potentially important contributions of other elongation mechanisms, specifically cell shape change, orientated cell division and cell rearrangement, are rarely considered or quantified, particularly in mammalian systems. Their quantification, together with proliferation, provides a rigorous framework for the analysis of elongation. The mammalian palatal epithelium is a landmark-rich tissue, marked by regularly spaced ridges (rugae), making it an excellent model in which to analyse the contributions of cellular processes to directional tissue growth. We captured confocal stacks of entire fixed mouse palate epithelia throughout the midgestation growth period, labelled with membrane, nuclear and cell proliferation markers and segmented all cells (up to ~20,000 per palate), allowing the quantification of cell shape and proliferation. Using the rugae as landmarks, these measures revealed that the socalled growth zone is a region of proliferation that is intermittently elevated at ruga initiation. The distribution of oriented cell division suggests that it is not a driver of tissue elongation, whereas cell shape analysis revealed that both elongation of cells leaving the growth zone and apico-basal cell rearrangements do contribute significantly to directional growth. Quantitative comparison of elongation processes indicated that proliferation contributes most to elongation at the growth zone, but cell shape change and rearrangement contribute as much as 40% of total elongation. We have demonstrated the utility of an approach to analysing the cellular mechanisms underlying tissue elongation in mammalian tissues. It should be broadly applied to higher-resolution analysis of links between genotypes and malformation phenotypes.

The 22q11 deletion syndromes represent a spectrum of overlapping conditions including cardiac defects and craniofacial malformations. Amongst the craniofacial anomalies that are seen, cleft of the secondary palate is a common feature. Haploinsufficiency of TBX1 is believed to be a major contributor toward many of the developmental structural anomalies that occur in these syndromes, and targeted deletion of Tbx1 in the mouse reproduces many of these malformations, including cleft palate. However, the cellular basis of this defect is only poorly understood. Here, palatal development in the absence of Tbx1 has been analysed, focusing on cellular properties within the whole mesenchymal volume of the palatal shelves. Novel image analyses and data presentation tools were applied to quantify cell proliferation rates, including regions of elevated as well as reduced proliferation, and cell packing in the mesenchyme. Also, cell orientations (nucleus–Golgi axis) were mapped as a potential marker of directional cell movement. Proliferation differed only subtly between wild‐type and mutant until embryonic day (E)15.5 when proliferation in the mutant was significantly lower. Tbx1 −/− palatal shelves had slightly different cell packing than wild‐type, somewhat lower before elevation and higher at E15.5 when the wild‐type palate has elevated and fused. Cell orientation is biased towards the shelf distal edge in the mid‐palate of wild‐type embryos but is essentially random in the Tbx1 −/− mutant shelves, suggesting that polarised processes such as directed cell rearrangement might be causal for the cleft phenotype. The implications of these findings in the context of further understanding Tbx1 function during palatogenesis and of these methods for the more general analysis of genotype–phenotype functional relationships are discussed.

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