Epithelial organ shape is generated by patterned actomyosin contractility and maintained by the extracellular matrix
Fig 4
Computationally testing the hypothesis of patterned ECM tension.
In these simulations, the passive tensile stress of the ECM associated with squamous cells (FECMs) is lower than the passive tensile stress of the ECM associated with columnar cells (FECMc). Extremely different tensile forces, FECMs v.s. FECMc, are needed to bend the tissue, (A) Initial and final frames of a representative computational simulation showing how higher tension in ECM associated with columnar cells in comparison with the tension in the ECM associated with squamous cells leads to slightly curved shape profile of the wing disc. Comparison of in-silico prediction of impacts of different levels of ECM tension on (B) curvature profile of experimental (n = 16) and simulated (n = 1) wing discs. Experimental data are shown with mean ± standard deviation. The final global curvature of the tissue is uniquely determined in the simulation with a specific set of input parameters; (C) the relative position of nuclei, (D) the height of columnar cells. In C and D, boxplots show minimum, first quartile, mean, third quartile, maximum, and outlier of simulated (n = 65) and experimental (n = 1064) columnar cells. “Baseline,” here, corresponds to the condition that the whole ECM is initiated without any tension in the simulation.