Journal
NATURE
Volume 561, Issue 7723, Pages 401-+Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0479-2
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Funding
- UCSB Animal Research Center
- EMBO [EMBO ALTF 509-2013]
- Errett Fisher Foundation
- Otis Williams Fund
- National Science Foundation [CMMI-1562910]
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health [R21HD084285, R01HD095797]
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Just as in clay moulding or glass blowing, physically sculpting biological structures requires the constituent material to locally flow like a fluid while maintaining overall mechanical integrity like a solid. Disordered soft materials, such as foams, emulsions and colloidal suspensions, switch from fluid-like to solid-like behaviours at a jamming transition(1-4). Similarly, cell collectives have been shown to display glassy dynamics in 2D and 3D(5,6) and jamming in cultured epithelial monolayers(7,)(8), behaviours recently predicted theoretically(9-11) and proposed to influence asthma pathobiology(8) and tumour progression(12). However, little is known about whether these seemingly universal behaviours occur in vivo(13) and, specifically, whether they play any functional part during embryonic morphogenesis. Here, by combining direct in vivo measurements of tissue mechanics with analysis of cellular dynamics, we show that during vertebrate body axis elongation, posterior tissues undergo a jamming transition from a fluid-like behaviour at the extending end, the mesodermal progenitor zone, to a solid-like behaviour in the presomitic mesoderm. We uncover an anteroposterior, N-cadherindependent gradient in yield stress that provides increasing mechanical integrity to the presomitic mesoderm, consistent with the tissue transiting from a wetter to a dryer foam-like architecture. Our results show that cell-scale stresses fluctuate rapidly (within about 1 min), enabling cell rearrangements and effectively 'melting' the tissue at the growing end. Persistent (more than 0.5 h) stresses at supracellular scales, rather than cell-scale stresses, guide morphogenetic flows in fluid-like tissue regions. Unidirectional axis extension is sustained by the reported rigidification of the presomitic mesoderm, which mechanically supports posterior, fluid-like tissues during remodelling before their maturation. The spatiotemporal control of fluid-like and solid-like tissue states may represent a generic physical mechanism of embryonic morphogenesis.
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