During development, cells consume energy, divide, rearrange, and die. Bulk properties such as viscosity and elasticity emerge from cell-scale mechanics and dynamics. Order appears, for example in patterns of hair outgrowth, or in the predominately hexagonal pattern of cell boundaries in the wing of a fruit fly. In the past fifty years, much progress has been made in understanding tissues as living materials. However, the physical mechanisms underlying tissue-scale behaviour are not completely understood. Here we apply theories from statistical physics and fluid dynamics to understand mechanics and order in two-dimensional tissues. We restrict our attention to the mechanics and dynamics of cell boundaries and vertices, and to planar polarity, a type of long-ranged order visible in anisotropic patterns of proteins and hair outgrowth.
Our principle tool for understanding mechanics and dynamics is a vertex model where cell shapes are represented using polygons. We analytically derive the ground-state diagram of this vertex model, finding it to be dominated by the geometric requirement that cells be polygons, and the topological requirement that those polygons tile the plane. We present a simplified algorithm for cell division and growth, and furthermore derive a dynamic equation for the vertex model, which we use to demonstrate the emergence of quasistatic behaviour in the limit of slow growth. All our results relating to the vertex model are consistent with and build off past calculations and experiments.
To investigate the emergence of planar polarity, we develop quantification methods for cell flow and planar polarity based on confocal microscope images of developing fly wings. We analyze cell flow using a velocity gradient tensor, which is uniquely decomposed into terms corresponding to local compression, shear, and rotations. We argue that a pattern in an inhomogeneously flowing tissue will necessarily be reorganized, motivating a hydrodynamic theory of polarity reorientation. Using such a coarse-grained theory of polarity reorientation, we show that the quantified patterns of shear and rotation in the wing are consistent with the observed polarity reorganization, and conclude that cell flow reorients planar polarity in the wing of the fruit fly. Finally, we present a cell-scale model of planar polarity based on the vertex model, unifying the themes of this thesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:25955 |
| Date | 21 March 2012 |
| Creators | Staple, Douglas |
| Contributors | Jülicher, Frank, Kroy, Klaus, Technische Universität Dresden |
| Publisher | Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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