Extended Data Fig. 9: Decoupling tension and bending modulus with flickering analysis.

To test our ability to decouple tension and bending modulus from our data during the flickering analysis, we took the 20 highest-tension and the 20 lowest-tension cells from our database and analysed their fluctuation power spectra, covering a wide enough range of q-values that both tension and bending moduli can be robustly extracted. a, b, Boxplots for the tensions and bending moduli of the 20 cells with extreme high and 20 with extreme low tensions. Although there is an obvious significant difference in tension (P = 4.0302 × 10⁻¹³; two-sided Mann–Whitney U-test), the bending moduli are similar. c, This is also evident from the overlapping of the two spectra for the high modes, where a bending-dominated regime prevails, although the divergence of the fluctuation amplitudes between the two spectra becomes noticeable when tension predominates. Each mean square fluctuation spectrum is obtained by averaging all 20 fluctuation spectra for both low-tension (blue) and high-tension (yellow) cells. As tension dominates low modes (q⁻¹ behaviour) and bending modulus dominates high modes of the spectra (q⁻³ trend), the decoupling between tension and bending modulus becomes evident from these two spectra (Supplementary Information Section S2).

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