TY - JOUR
T1 - Mechanics of epithelial tissue formation
AU - van Drongelen, Ruben
AU - Vazquez-Faci, Tania
AU - Huijben, Teun A.P.M.
AU - van der Zee, Maurijn
AU - Idema, Timon
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - 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, based on mechanical interactions between the cells, 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 grow at different rates.
AB - 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, based on mechanical interactions between the cells, 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 grow at different rates.
KW - Biophysical modeling
KW - Cellular mechanics
KW - Development
KW - Voronoi tessellation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85048411397&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.06.002
DO - 10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.06.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048411397
SN - 0022-5193
VL - 454
SP - 182
EP - 189
JO - Journal of Theoretical Biology
JF - Journal of Theoretical Biology
ER -