From: Mechanobiology & Biomaterials group, University of Mons, Belgium

Will give a seminar entitled:

Mechanobiology of epithelial tissues:
sensing curvature and spatial confinement

The directed migration of epithelial cell collectives through coordinated movements is key to many physiological and pathological processes and is often study at the level of large confluent monolayers. However, numerous migration processes rely on the migration of small groups of polarized epithelial clusters and their responses to external geometries. In the meantime, the development and functioning of many organisms involve the folding of epithelial monolayers that must adapt to variations in local curvature. Despite their importance on the homeostasis of epithelial systems, spatial confinement and curvature changes are difficult to reproduce, limiting our understanding of these complex mechanisms¹. In this presentation, we will first introduce well-defined in vitro systems based on micropatterned adhesive stripes to investigate the migration of small epithelial clusters with well-defined geometries. We will highlight the importance of geometry in defining the migration properties of individual cells² and cell clusters³, providing a conceptual framework to extract interaction rules from how active systems interact with physical boundaries. In a second part, we will introduce a photopolymerization technique using optical photomasks to form wavy hydrogels, allowing to examine how concave and convex curvatures affect the mechanical properties of epithelial monolayers^4,5 and induce nuclear deformations⁶. We will show that active cell mechanics and nuclear mechanoadaptation are key players of the mechanistic regulation of epithelia to substrate curvature.

References
[1] M. Luciano et al. Biophys. Rev. 3, 011305 2022
[2] D. Mohammed et al. Nat. Phys., 15, 858-866 2019
[3] E. Vercruysse et al. Nat. Phys., in press 2024
[4] M. Luciano et al. Nat. Phys., 17, 1382-1390 2021
[5] M. Luciano et al. Adv. Health. Mat., in press 2024
[6] Y. Kalukula et al. Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 23, 583–602 2022

Figure 1. Top (left) and side (right) confocal views of wavy epithelial monolayers cultivated on corrugated hydrogels and immunostained for actin (green), DNA (blue) and cadherin (red). The scale bar is 10 µm.

Speaker website