The Mechanics of Tissue Morphogenesis
Cells and tissues display remarkable robustness, i.e., the ability to keep a polarized or vectorial organization, important for their physiological role. Meanwhile epithelia show tremendous plasticity, during embryonic development and organ regeneration,
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Abstract Cells and tissues display remarkable robustness, i.e., the ability to keep a polarized or vectorial organization, important for their physiological role. Meanwhile epithelia show tremendous plasticity, during embryonic development and organ regeneration, i.e., the capacity to adapt to intrinsic or extrinsic signals or perturbations. We are interested in deciphering basic principles of cell and tissue organization and dynamics with a special focus on the problem of how robustness and plasticity are jointly regulated. The main problem I will discuss is an example of tissue plasticity manifested in embryonic tissues. I will present our current research characterizing how the spatial distribution of tension in cells controls locally stereotyped cell shape changes and how these in turn are coordinated at the tissue level to produce tissue morphogenesis. The presentation will delineate (1) spatio-temporal patterns in cell dynamics driving tissue morphogenesis; (2) the subcellular force-generating systems driving these kinematic patterns; (3) how tension transmission affects this process. We will discuss how fluctuations in contractile activity are spatially organized to yield robust and reproducible symmetry-breaking in cell dynamics. The underlying theme will be to understand how tissue-level dynamics emerges from subcellular mechanics.
1 Introduction As everybody knows, in living organisms, shapes are wonderful, very diverse, amazing, and it might take more than 20 pages just to try to illustrate the concepts of diversity; and the point is that underlying, or behind, this diversity of complexity,
Adapted from the talk given at the IHES Workshop on 11 January 2010. T. Lecuit (*) Institut de Biologie du De´veloppement de Marseille Luminy (IBDML), UMR 6216, CNRS-Universite´ de la Me´diterranne´e, Campus de Luminy, case 907, Marseille cedex 09 13288, France e-mail: [email protected] V. Capasso et al. (eds.), Pattern Formation in Morphogenesis, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics 15, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-20164-6_6, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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we as biologists and scientists would like to understand what the underlying order is. Henri Poincare´ (1854–1912) said: “The researcher must organize; one does science with facts as one builds a house with stones; but an accumulation of facts is not a science, just as an accumulation of stones is not a house.” And I think it suitable to quote a famous mathematician, who actually had a very strong statement on this, years ago – I don’t know if he was talking about science in general, or mathematics in particular, but it certainly applies to biology, because we have such a diversity of shapes, structures, dynamics, and everything; thus I would like first to propose three major directions (topics) to try to describe the underlying rules of construction in the structures of embryos. The first one is obvious, and I think it beautifully illustrates the concepts of pattern formation – and, in a way, of dominant inheritance. It has be
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