Abstract
Cranial sutures are essential for skull growth and tissue homeostasis. Among them, the coronal suture is most frequently affected in syndromic craniosynostosis, yet the mechanisms underlying this preferential involvement remain unclear. Here, we show that the coronal suture mesenchyme undergoes a postnatal lineage transition from mesodermal to cranial neural crest origin, facilitated by dural cell migration into the suture. Mechanistically, this migration is regulated by suture TGFβ signals to Tgfbr2+ dural cells. Loss of dural Tgfbr2 impairs this cell migration into the suture, reduces the Gli1+ suture progenitor pool, and causes premature coronal suture fusion. Furthermore, in Twist1+/- mice recapitulating human Saethre-Chotzen syndrome, upregulated decorin leads to compromised TGFβ signaling, which impairs dural cell migration, leading to craniosynostosis. Significantly, restoring TGFβ signaling rescues coronal suture patency in Twist1+/- mice. These findings identify the critical role of TGFβ-mediated dural-suture interactions, particularly dural cell migration, in maintaining coronal suture patency and provide an explanation for the preferential coronal fusion in syndromic craniosynostosis.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge Bridget Samuels, Kimi Nakaki, and Linda Hattemer (Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology, USC) for their critical review of the manuscript. We thank Drs. Robert Maxson and Pedro Sanchez for Twist1+/− mice and discussion. We thank Ivetta Vorobyova (Molecular Imaging Center, USC) for all the live micro-CT scanning. This work was supported by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, National Institutes of Health (NIDCR/NIH R01 DE0030901 to Y.C.).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Source data
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Chen, P., Meng, L., Lan, L. et al. TGFβ-mediated dural progenitor cell migration into the coronal suture is crucial for preventing craniosynostosis. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73292-w
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73292-w
