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Measuring and manipulating mechanical forces during development

Nature Cell Biology volume 27, pages 575–590 (2025) Cite this article

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Abstract

Tissue deformations are a central feature of development, from early embryogenesis, growth and building the body plan to the establishment of functional organs. These deformations often result from active contractile forces generated by cells and cell collectives, and are mediated by changes in their mechanical properties. Mechanical forces drive the formation of functional organ architectures, but they also coordinate cell behaviour and fate transitions, ensuring robustness of development. Advances in microscopy, genetics and chemistry have enabled increasingly powerful tools for measuring, generating and perturbing mechanical forces. Here we discuss approaches to measure and manipulate mechanical forces with a focus on developmental processes, ranging from quantification of molecular interactions to mapping the mechanical properties of tissues. We focus on contemporary methods, and discuss the biological discoveries that these approaches have enabled. We conclude with an outlook to methodologies at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology to build an integrated understanding of tissue morphodynamics.

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Fig. 1: Basic concepts of mechanotransduction and mechanochemical feedback across scales.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 2: Overview of approaches to quantify mechanical properties during embryonic development.
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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the mechanobiology field for developing the methods discussed here and apologize for omitting citations due to space limitations. We thank A. Hussien, M. Albu and L. Biggs for commenting on the manuscript. Mechanobiology studies in the Wickström laboratory are supported by the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence BarrierForce, the Max Planck Society (to S.A.W.) and European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101032331 (to C.V.).

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Clémentine Villeneuve, Kaitlin P. McCreery.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cell and Tissue Dynamics, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, Münster, Germany

    Clémentine Villeneuve, Kaitlin P. McCreery & Sara A. Wickström

  2. Stem Cells and Metabolism Research Program, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Sara A. Wickström

  3. Helsinki Institute of Life Science, Biomedicum Helsinki, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Sara A. Wickström

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  1. Clémentine Villeneuve
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  2. Kaitlin P. McCreery
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C.V., K.P.M. and S.A.W. conceived the concept and wrote the manuscript.

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Villeneuve, C., McCreery, K.P. & Wickström, S.A. Measuring and manipulating mechanical forces during development. Nat Cell Biol 27, 575–590 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41556-025-01632-x

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