Mechanical Stress Inference for Two Dimensional Cell Arrays
Figure 1
Micrographs of a fixed avian cochlear epithelium (kindly provided by Goodyear and Richardson, see [29] for details) at the E9 stage of development just following the onset of differentiation of cells into hair cell precursors and surrounding support cells.
Panel (A) visualizes cell boundaries using and anti-cingulin (a tight junction protein) staning. Panel (B) shows the same tissue with pro-neural cells [29] stained via an anti-hair cell antigen. (C) is a computer generated segmentation of the raw image in (A) as a polygonal tiling which approximates cell geometry. The zoomed-in image (D) defines our parametrization of cell geometry in terms of vertex coordinates and of the mechanical state of the cell in terms of interfacial tensions
and hydrostatic pressures
.