Mechanics of epithelial tissue formation
Biological Physics
2018-07-05 v3 Soft Condensed Matter
Tissues and Organs
Abstract
A key process in the life of any multicellular organism is its development from a single egg into a full grown adult. The first step in this process often consists of forming a tissue layer out of randomly placed cells on the surface of the egg. We present a model for generating such a tissue, and find that the resulting cellular pattern corresponds to the Voronoi tessellation of the nuclei of the cells. Experimentally, we obtain the same result in both fruit flies and flour beetles, with a distribution of cell shapes that matches that of the model, without any adjustable parameters. Finally, we show that this pattern is broken when the cells do not all grow at the same rate.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.06205,
title = {Mechanics of epithelial tissue formation},
author = {Ruben van Drongelen and Tania Vazquez-Faci and Teun A. P. M. Huijben and Maurijn van der Zee and Timon Idema},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.06205},
year = {2018}
}