Mechanics of epithelial tissue formation

TL;DR

This paper presents a model for epithelial tissue formation that predicts cellular patterns as Voronoi tessellations, validated by experiments in fruit flies and beetles, and explores how growth rate differences disrupt this pattern.

Contribution

It introduces a model linking cell placement to Voronoi tessellations and validates it with biological data, revealing the impact of growth rate variations.

Findings

Cell patterns match Voronoi tessellations in experiments.

Model accurately predicts cell shape distributions.

Unequal cell growth disrupts the tessellation pattern.

Abstract

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, 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 do not all grow at the same rate.