Measurement of adhesion and traction of cells at high yield (MATCHY) reveals an energetic ratchet driving nephron condensation.

Engineering of embryonic strategies for tissue-building has extraordinary promise for regenerative medicine. This has led to a resurgence in interest in the relationship between cell biophysical properties and morphological transitions. However, mapping gene or protein expression data to cell biophysical properties to physical morphogenesis remains challenging with current techniques. Here we present MATCHY (multiplexed adhesion and traction of cells at high yield). MATCHY advances the multiplexing and throughput capabilities of existing traction force and cell-cell adhesion assays using microfabrication and an automated computation scheme with machine learning-driven cell segmentation. Both biophysical assays are coupled with serial downstream immunofluorescence to extract cell type/signaling state information. MATCHY is especially suited to complex primary tissue-, organoid-, or biopsy-derived cell mixtures since it does not rely on