The vertebral column or spine assembles around the notochord rod which contains a core made of large vacuolated cells. Each vacuolated cell possesses a single fluid-filled vacuole, and loss or fragmentation of these vacuoles in zebrafish leads to spine kinking. Here, we identified a mutation in the kinase gene dstyk that causes fragmentation of notochord vacuoles and a severe congenital scoliosis-like phenotype in zebrafish. Live imaging revealed that Dstyk regulates fusion of membranes with the vacuole. We find that localized disruption of notochord vacuoles causes vertebral malformation and curving of the spine axis at those sites. Accordingly, in dstyk mutants the spine curves increasingly over time as vertebral bone formation compresses the notochord asymmetrically, causing vertebral malformations and kinking of the axis. Together, our data show that notochord vacuoles function as a hydrostatic scaffold that guides symmetrical growth of vertebrae and spine formation.

This dataset includes all raw imaging data for all figures and supplementary figures.

All whole mount images and confocal files have not been processed.    

Also included is the raw micro-ct data for figure 2E and 2F and the cropped lightsheet movies. Lightsheet files were cropped to only include the slice of interest. 

All data collected for quantifications is located in the excel file in the figure 1 folder.   

Each tab in the excel file refers the the raw data from the cooresponding figure.