Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 17: Poster Session II
BP 17.76: Poster
Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 18:00–20:30, P4
Illuminating forces in living tissues — •Lucia Baldauf1, Anna Bajur2, Katelyn Spillane2, and Guillaume Charras1 — 1London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London, UK — 2Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, UK
How can epithelial tissues withstand large forces and support deformations that drastically increase their length? Adult epithelial tissues regularly experience forces that stretch them by up to 50 %, and deformations can reach several hundred percent during development. To fulfill their physiological barrier function, epithelia must accommodate such large deformations without fracturing. Consequently, cell-cell adhesions must be finely tuned, or pathologies like skin blistering or cancer metastasis can occur. However, the physical principles governing tissue integrity remain difficult to study, since tissue fracture is a multi-scale process spanning up to 10 orders of magnitude in both size and force. Millimetre-sized tissues can withstand millinewton-forces, but tissue fracture results from the local failure of single nanometre-sized adhesion complexes that bear piconewton forces. New tools are needed to bridge these vastly different scales and understand what molecular processes lead to tissue failure. Here we develop a new experimental tool to study tissue integrity and force propagation across scales. We engineer living model tissues where DNA-based molecular force sensors in chimeric cell-cell junctions provide a local molecular-scale force readout, for the first time illuminating how forces propagate in living tissues under stretch.
Keywords: tissue fracture; force sensors; DNA nanotechnology; cell-cell junctions; epithelia