Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Cuvelier, Maxim
• Pešek, Ji í
• Papantoniou, Ioannis
• Ramon, Herman
• Smeets, Bart

Titel

Distribution and propagation of mechanical stress in simulated structurally heterogeneous tissue spheroids

Ist Teil von

• Soft matter, 2021-07, Vol.17 (27), p.663-6615

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The mechanical microenvironment of cells has been associated with phenotypic changes that cells undergo in three-dimensional spheroid culture formats. Radial asymmetry in mechanical stress - with compression in the core and tension at the periphery - has been analyzed by representing tissue spheroids as homogeneous visco-elastic droplets under surface tension. However, the influence of the granular microstructure of tissue spheroids in the distribution of mechanical stress in tissue spheroids has not been accounted for in a generic manner. Here, we quantify the distribution and propagation of mechanical forces in structurally heterogeneous multicellular assemblies. For this, we perform numerical simulations of a deformable cell model, which represents cells as elastic, contractile shells surrounding a liquid incompressible cytoplasm, interacting by means of non-specific adhesion. Using this model, we show how cell-scale properties such as cortical stiffness, active tension and cell-cell adhesive tension influence the distribution of mechanical stress in simulated tissue spheroids. Next, we characterize the transition at the tissue-scale from a homogeneous liquid droplet to a heterogeneous packed granular assembly. We unravel how mechanical stress heterogeneity and core-periphery asymmetry in tissue spheroids are modulated by their granular micro-structure, by means of simulations with a deformable cell model.