Fig. 3: Impact of biomechanical cell properties on tissue structure.
From: SimuCell3D: three-dimensional simulation of tissue mechanics with cell polarization
a, Initial tissue geometry: a hollow spherical vesicle made up of 432 columnar epithelial cells. The central luminal region (turquoise) was represented by a non-growing volume. On its basal side, the tissue was encased by a surface representing the ECM (red). b, Final monolayer conformation after epithelial volume doubling with weak cortical tension. c, Final multilayer conformation at strong cortical tension. d, Schematic cross-section through the epithelium with a cell connectivity graph on which the layer number N was determined. e, Impact of cell surface tension and adhesion strength on the average number of cell layers. Isolines represent support vector machine discriminants. Each data point corresponds to the final state of one numerical simulation. Simulations in which the whole tissue remained a monolayer (N ≡ 1) are shown as squares. f, Effect of cortical tension on cell shape, as measured by sphericity, and on the number of layers (colors). The dashed black curve is a fitted logistic function.
