STRESS, an automated geometrical characterization of deformable particles for in vivo measurements of cell and tissue mechanical stresses

Publikation: Beitrag in FachzeitschriftForschungsartikelBeigetragenBegutachtung

Beitragende

  • Ben Jeffrey Gross - , Exzellenzcluster PoL: Physik des Lebens (Autor:in)
  • Johannes Richard Soltwedel - , University of California at Santa Barbara (Autor:in)
  • Elijah Shelton - , Exzellenzcluster PoL: Physik des Lebens (Autor:in)
  • Carlos Gomez - , University of California at Santa Barbara (Autor:in)
  • Otger Campàs - , Exzellenzcluster PoL: Physik des Lebens, Professur für Dynamik von Geweben (PoL), University of California at Santa Barbara, Max-Planck-Institut für molekulare Zellbiologie und Genetik, Zentrum für Systembiologie Dresden (CSBD) (Autor:in)

Abstract

From cellular mechanotransduction to the formation of embryonic tissues and organs, mechanics has been shown to play an important role in the control of cell behavior and embryonic development. Most of our existing knowledge of how mechanics affects cell behavior comes from in vitro studies, mainly because measuring cell and tissue mechanics in 3D multicellular systems, and especially in vivo, remains challenging. Oil microdroplet sensors, and more recently gel microbeads, use surface deformations to directly quantify mechanical stresses within developing tissues, in vivo and in situ, as well as in 3D in vitro systems like organoids or multicellular spheroids. However, an automated analysis software able to quantify the spatiotemporal evolution of stresses and their characteristics from particle deformations is lacking. Here we develop STRESS (Surface Topography Reconstruction for Evaluation of Spatiotemporal Stresses), an analysis software to quantify the geometry of deformable particles of spherical topology, such as microdroplets or gel microbeads, that enables the automatic quantification of the temporal evolution of stresses in the system and the spatiotemporal features of stress inhomogeneities in the tissue. As a test case, we apply these new code to measure the temporal evolution of mechanical stresses using oil microdroplets in developing zebrafish tissues. Starting from a 3D timelapse of a droplet, the software automatically calculates the statistics of local anisotropic stresses, decouples the deformation modes associated with tissue- and cell-scale stresses, obtains their spatial features on the droplet surface and analyzes their spatiotemporal variations using spatial and temporal stress autocorrelations. We provide fully automated software in Matlab/Python and also in Napari (napari-STRESS), which allows the visualization of mechanical stresses on the droplet surface together with the microscopy images of the biological systems. The automated nature of the analysis will help users obtain quantitative information about mechanical stresses in a wide range of 3D multicellular systems, from developing embryos or tissue explants to organoids.

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
Aufsatznummer28599
FachzeitschriftScientific reports
Jahrgang15
Ausgabenummer1
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 5 Aug. 2025
Peer-Review-StatusJa

Schlagworte

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete