Quantification of Morphogenetic Reorganisations

(in progress)

Coworkers: G. Blanchard, L. Mahadevan, R. Adams

The shape evolution of living tissue is primarily determined by cell motility and cell adhesion. Although cell reorganization is unambiguously defined at the cell scale by discrete neighbor changes, key morphogenetic processes become measurable only at an intermediate spatial scale. Tools that span cellular and mesoscopic scales are thus required in order to relate tissue-wide deformations to the fundamental underlying cellular mechanisms that drive morphogenesis. We introduce a comprehensive framework for quantifying the mesoscale kinematics of morphogenesis. Using simultaneously information from cell displacements and cell shape changes, we quantitatively distinguish the contributions of individual cell deformation and neighbor change to the global deformation field. This framework is tested on real and simulated data, and allowed the direct evaluation of rheological models for soft living tissues.