ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Direct laser manipulation reveals the mechanics of cell contacts in vivo.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 114 papers.
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Who cites it
114 citing papers in PubMed, 252 citations in OpenAlex.
- TiFM2.0 - versatile mechanical measurement and actuation in live embryos.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2026Article
- Macrophages Mediate Mesoscale Brain Mechanical Homeostasis.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- Article
- Repeated extrinsic and anisotropic mechanical inputs promote C. elegans polarized adherens junction elongation.Developmental cell · 2025Article
- Measuring molecular forces inside living cells using magnetic tweezers.Biophysical reviews · 2025Review
- Harnessing optical forces with advanced nanophotonic structures: principles and applications.Discover nano · 2025Review
- Origin of yield stress and mechanical plasticity in model biological tissues.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Epithelial Layer Fluidization by Curvature-Induced Unjamming.Physical review letters · 2025Article
- Tissue stiffness mapping by light sheet elastography.Science advances · 2025Article
- Remodeling of lipid-foam prototissues by network-wide tension fluctuations induced by active particles.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Mechanics of Drosophila wing deployment.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Optical microscopic imaging, manipulation, and analysis methods for morphogenesis research.Microscopy (Oxford, England) · 2024Review
- A mechanical transition from tension to buckling underlies the jigsaw puzzle shape morphogenesis of histoblasts in the Drosophila epidermis.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Conserved physical mechanisms of cell and tissue elongation.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Review
- The Geometric Basis of Epithelial Convergent Extension.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Adherens junctions as molecular regulators of emergent tissue mechanics.Nature reviews. Molecular cell biology · 2024Review
- Macrophage mediated mesoscale brain mechanical homeostasis mechanically imaged via optical tweezers and Brillouin microscopybioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- SEMAPL bioengineering · 2023Article
- Embryo mechanics cartography: inference of 3D force atlases from fluorescence microscopy.Nature methods · 2023Article
54 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cell-generated forces produce a variety of tissue movements and tissue shape changes. The cytoskeletal elements that underlie these dynamics act at cell-cell and cell-ECM contacts to apply local forces on adhesive structures. In epithelia, force imbalance at cell contacts induces cell shape changes, such as apical constriction or polarized junction remodeling, driving tissue morphogenesis. The dynamics of these processes are well-characterized; however, the mechanical basis of cell shape changes is largely unknown because of a lack of mechanical measurements in vivo. We have developed an approach combining optical tweezers with light-sheet microscopy to probe the mechanical properties of epithelial cell junctions in the early Drosophila embryo. We show that optical trapping can efficiently deform cell-cell interfaces and measure tension at cell junctions, which is on the order of 100 pN. We show that tension at cell junctions equilibrates over a few seconds, a short timescale compared with the contractile events that drive morphogenetic movements. We also show that tension increases along cell interfaces during early tissue morphogenesis and becomes anisotropic as cells intercalate during germ-band extension. By performing pull-and-release experiments, we identify time-dependent properties of junctional mechanics consistent with a simple viscoelastic model. Integrating this constitutive law into a tissue-scale model, we predict quantitatively how local deformations propagate throughout the tissue.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.