Comparison between phase-field model and coarse-grained model for characterizing cell-resolved morphological and mechanical properties in a multicellular system

Embryonic development is a precise and complex process involving the cell mor-phology and mechanics interacting in space and time. The difficulty in quantitatively acquiring cellular morphological and mechanical information in vivo makes mathe-matical modeling a challenging problem and impedes model validation. Recently, the three-dimensional time-lapse live imaging and delineated developmental programs in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans provide an excellent platform for establishing quantitative models. In this paper, we study two popular computational models for multicellular systems, i.e., the phase-field model and the coarse-grained model, and compare their performance in characterizing the cell morphologies, cell adhesion, and cell stiffness in a real C. elegans embryo. We show that both models can capture cell-cell contact areas and heterogeneous cell adhesion, but only the phase-field model succeeds in inferring the heterogeneous cell stiffness by fitting cell shapes or cell-cell interface curvatures. Moreover, we demonstrate that the phase-field model converges to the coarse-grained model when increasing cell surface tension to dominance, obtaining a distance-dependent isotropic intercellular force.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

In this study, the authors compare two popular computational models, the phase-field model and the coarse-grained model, in characterizing cell morphologies, adhesion, and stiffness in a real C. elegans embryo. They find that the phase-field model is superior in capturing cell shapes and inferring cell stiffness. They also demonstrate that the phase-field model converges to the coarse-grained model under certain conditions, obtaining an isotropic intercellular force.