Spontaneous Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Planar Polarized Epithelia

Abstract: Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from molecules to tissues during development, however, is not well understood. Here we explore an alternative paradigm where tissue chirality results from spontaneous symmetry breaking at the cellular scale, with molecular chirality acting only as a weak bias that ensures that one handedness predominates over the other. Specifically, we show that systems capable of generating planar polarity, found in many epithelial tissues, can also generically break left-right symmetry, and we identify the key interaction parameters that must be varied to access the chiral phase. In addition to a chiral polar phase corresponding to one found in liquid crystal films, a two-dimensional chiral nematic phase with no liquid crystal analog is also possible. Our results have clear implications for the interpretation of mutant phenotypes, especially in certain Drosophila epithelia.