Quantitative methods to study epithelial morphogenesis and polarity.

Morphogenesis of an epithelial tissue emerges from the behavior of its constituent cells, including changes in shape, rearrangements, and divisions. In many instances the directionality of these cellular events is controlled by the polarized distribution of specific molecular components. In recent years, our understanding of morphogenesis and polarity highly benefited from advances in genetics, microscopy, and image analysis. They now make it possible to measure cellular dynamics and polarity with unprecedented precision for entire tissues throughout their development. Here we review recent approaches to visualize and measure cell polarity and tissue morphogenesis. The chapter is organized like an experiment. We first discuss the choice of cell and polarity reporters and describe the use of mosaics to reveal hidden cell polarities or local morphogenetic events. Then, we outline application-specific advantages and disadvantages of different microscopy techniques and image projection algorithms. Next, we present methods to extract cell outlines to measure cell polarity and detect cellular events underlying morphogenesis. Finally, we bridge scales by presenting approaches to quantify the specific contribution of each cellular event to global tissue deformation. Taken together, we provide an in-depth description of available tools and theoretical concepts to quantitatively study cell polarity and tissue morphogenesis over multiple scales.

Mechanics and remodelling of cell packings in epithelia.

Epithelia are sheets of cells that are dynamically remodelled by cell division and cell death during development. Here we describe the cell shapes and packings as networks of polygons: stable and stationary network configurations obey force balance and are represented as local minima of a potential function. We characterize the physical properties of this vertex model, including the set of ground states, and the energetics of topological rearrangements. We furthermore discuss a quasistatic description of cell division that allows us to study the mechanics and dynamics of tissue remodelling during growth. The biophysics of cells and their rearrangements can account for the morphology of cell packings observed in experiments.