2015/12/31 by Étienne Fodor, É. Fodor, Vishwajeet Mehandia +13 · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #3D Printing in Biomedical Research #Actin #Biocrusts and Microbial Ecology #Biological system #Biology #Biophysics #Cell biology #Cellular Mechanics and Interactions #Chemistry #Computer science #Condensed matter physics #Mesoscopic physics #Myosin #Physics #Vertex (graph theory) #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.bio-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.bpj.2017.12.026
published as Biophys. J. 114, 939 (2018) · 8 pages, 3 figures
openalex publication_date 2018/02/01 · arxiv created 2018/02/06 · arxiv updated 2018/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In living matter, shape fluctuations induced by acto-myosin are usually studied in vitro via reconstituted gels, whose properties are controlled by changing the concentrations of actin, myosin and cross-linkers. Such an approach deliberately avoids to consider the complexity of biochemical signaling inherent to living systems. Acto-myosin activity inside living cells is mainly regulated by the Rho signaling pathway which is composed of multiple layers of coupled activators and inhibitors. We investigate how such a pathway controls the dynamics of confluent epithelial tissues by tracking the displacements of the junction points between cells. Using a phenomenological model to analyze the vertex fluctuations, we rationalize the effects of different Rho signaling targets on the emergent tissue activity by quantifying the effective diffusion coefficient, the persistence time and persistence length of the fluctuations. Our results reveal an unanticipated correlation between layers of activation/inhibition and spatial fluctuations within tissues. Overall, this work connects the regulation via biochemical signaling with mesoscopic spatial fluctuations, with potential application to the study of structural rearrangements in epithelial tissues.