Section: Application Domains

Contraction of acto-myosin structures in morphogenesis and tissue repair

In 2014, L. Almeida, I. Cheddadi, C. Emako-Kazianou, P. Bagnerini (Univ. Genova), A. Jacinto (CEDOC, Lisbon), P. Patricio (CEDOC, Lisbon), B. Ladoux (Inst. J. Monod) and N. Gov (Weizmann Institute) have continued to investigate the dependence of physical and biological mechanisms of actomyosin cable formation and wound closure depending on the geometry of the wound and adhesion to the substrate, with particular emphasis on the effect of the wound edge curvature. We extended our work from in vivo studies to in vitro situations taking advantage of a collaboration with the group of Benoît Ladoux who did experiments on cell monolayers of human keratinocytes and of MDCK cells. We could single out some similar geometry dependence of the wound closure strategies between these two settings indicating the existence of conserved mechanisms that should be very general across living beings.

In our model under development, we consider viscous behaviour and friction in the tissue plus boundary terms associated to cable and lamellipodial forces. The numerical simulations obtained using this model are in good agreement with the experimental results. This work is attracting considerable attention from the community.