Mechanical behaviour of tissue spheroids from single cell properties

The mechanical properties of tissues play a crucial role in many biological processes such as embryonic morphogenesis, cancer growth and metastasis, and wound healing. Spheroids, small cell aggregates, are an often-used model system to study the biophysics of tissues. Spheroids are active matter systems that exhibit a variety of complex behaviours, ranging from visco-elastic liquids to jammed solids and even collectively moving 'flocks'. How these phenotypes emerge from single cell mechanical properties and their interactions is not yet understood. Yet, new experimental techniques allow us to quantify in detail the mechanics of both single cells and small tissues, at biologically relevant timescales. Moreover, recent advances in particle-based methods enable us to, for the first time, create computational models that describe mechanical interactions between irregularly shaped cell packings. We will develop a quantitative methodology for a comprehensive understanding of micro-tissue rheology based on single cell mechanical properties. For this, we will develop state of the art computational models that will be evaluated against extensive mechanical tests with Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Micropipette Aspiration (MA) on single cells as well as small tissue spheroids.

Keywords:cell mechanics, tissue spheroids, particle-based models, mechanical microenvironment, atomic force microscopy, micropipette aspiration

Disciplines:Applied mathematics in specific fields, Computer architecture and networks, Distributed computing, Information sciences, Information systems, Programming languages, Scientific computing, Theoretical computer science, Visual computing, Other information and computing sciences, Biomechanics, Biophysics