Speaker Institution: University of California at Santa Barbara
Title: Mechanical Control of Cell and Tissue Morphogenesis
Abstract: The sculpting of cells and tissues into their functional morphologies requires a tight spatiotemporal control of their mechanics. Despite its relevance, little is known about how mechanics affects/controls cellular and developmental processes and, more specifically, morphogenesis. In this talk, I will first describe the role of mechanics in sculpting individual walled cells, using the mating projection of budding yeast as motivating example. Our results indicate that describing the cell wall as a growing viscous shell with inhomogeneous viscosity is sufficient to understand the experimental observations, as long as a mechanical feedback is present in the system. Combining theoretical and experimental approaches, we show that a genetically-encoded mechanical feedback stabilizes cell morphogenesis. Beyond the cellular scale, I will describe two new microdroplet-based techniques that we have recently developed to directly quantify mechanical forces and mechanical properties in situ within living tissues and developing organs. Using these techniques we show that the sculpting of the vertebrate body axis entails spatially-varying tissue mechanical properties along the anteroposterior axis. These findings reveal that the spatiotemporal control of mechanical properties may constitute a fundamental mechanism underlying both cell and tissue morphogenesis.