Planar polarization of cilia in the zebrafish floor-plate involves Par3-mediated posterior localization of highly motile basal bodies

To produce a directional flow, ciliated epithelia display a uniform orientation of ciliary beating. Oriented beating requires planar cell polarity (PCP), which leads to planar orientation and asymmetric positioning of the ciliary basal body (BB) along the polarity axis. We took advantage of the polarized mono-ciliated epithelium of the embryonic zebrafish floor plate to investigate by live-imaging the dynamics and mechanisms of BB polarization. We showed that BBs, although bearing a cilium, were highly motile along the antero-posterior axis. BBs contacted both the anterior and the posterior membranes, with a bias towards posterior contacts from early somitogenesis on. Contacts exclusively occurred at junctional Par3 local enrichments or “patches” and were often preceded by transient membrane digitations extending towards the BB, suggesting focused cortical pulling forces. Accordingly, BBs and Par3 patches were linked by dynamic microtubules. We showed that Par3 became posteriorly enriched prior to BB posterior positioning and that floor plate polarization was impaired upon Par3 patches disruption triggered by Par3 or aPKC overexpression. In the PCP mutant Vangl2, where floor plate cells fail to polarize, we observed that BB were still motile but presented behavioral defects, such as ectopic contacts with lateral membranes that correlated with Par3 patch fragmentation and spreading to lateral membranes. Our data lead us to propose an unexpected function for posterior local Par3 enrichment in controlling BB asymmetric positioning downstream of the PCP pathway via a microtubule capture/shrinkage mechanism