Berlin 2024 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 32: Tissue Mechanics II

BP 32.1: Talk

Thursday, March 21, 2024, 15:00–15:15, H 2032

Letting cells off the Hook: A non-mechanistic vertex model predicts inverse stress-strain relation in epithelial tissues by statistical inference. — •Zoë Lange and Franziska Matthäus — Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Disordered epithelial cell packings are considered to be a result of cell mechanics, cell-cell interaction and proliferation (Farhadifar et al. 2007). A recent vertex model proposes remodeling of cell-cell junction length and tension as a proliferation-free alternative explanation (Pérez-Verdugo & Banerjee 2023). Despite the mechanical basis of vertex models it remains poorly understood how stress and strain in epithelial tissues relate to each other on the cell scale. We use a non-mechanistic vertex model to estimate effective forces in different epithelial tissues by statistical inference (Ishihara & Sugimura 2012). We obtain an inverse relation between tension and cell shape in both proliferating and non-proliferating epithelial tissues. We show that the modulus of the relation is exclusively negative even when tissue is not stretched. We find that the cell perimeter alone is not correlated with tension. Our work highlights how the power of statistical inference will contribute to unravelling different contributions of sub-cellular processes on macroscopic properties of tissues by extracting empirical laws from experimental data.

Keywords: Statistical inference; Vertex model; Epithelial tissue; Constitutive relation; Inverse problem