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

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Ben Jeffrey Gross - , Clusters of Excellence PoL: Physics of Life (Author)
  • Johannes Richard Soltwedel - , University of California at Santa Barbara (Author)
  • Elijah Shelton - , Clusters of Excellence PoL: Physics of Life (Author)
  • Carlos Gomez - , University of California at Santa Barbara (Author)
  • Otger Campàs - , Clusters of Excellence PoL: Physics of Life, Chair of Tissue Dynamics (PoL), University of California at Santa Barbara, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) (Author)

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

Original languageEnglish
Article number28599
JournalScientific reports
Volume15
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 5 Aug 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas