Spatiotemporal connectivity of multicellular rearrangements in epithelial tissues

Determine how multicellular rearrangement events in epithelial tissues subjected to large deformations are connected in time and space, by characterizing the spatiotemporal relationships that link localized rearrangements across the tissue and clarifying their temporal sequencing and spatial propagation.

Background

Biological tissues experience substantial mechanical stresses, and in response to large deformations cells undergo multicellular rearrangements to maintain integrity. While individual cell rearrangements have been extensively studied, a critical unresolved issue has been the manner in which these local events organize collectively across space and time to produce tissue-level mechanical responses.

This paper investigates mechanical plasticity in epithelial monolayers using a Voronoi-based Vertex model under quasi-static shear, analyzing stress redistribution and avalanche-like cascades of rearrangements. The stated knowledge gap concerns the spatiotemporal connections among these local events, motivating the authors’ subsequent modeling and correlation analyses.