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Tissue biophysics

Symmetry depends on scale in cellular monolayers

Nature Physics (2023)Cite this article

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The liquid-crystal-like order of cells in epithelial tissues aids rearrangements, but there is disagreement over the dominant liquid crystal phase. Now, a unified approach reveals that two distinct symmetries dominate at different scales.

As wounds heal, embryos develop or tumours invade healthy tissue, coordinated cell rearrangements enable epithelial tissues to change shape. Underlying this coordination is the tendency of densely packed cells to take on the forms of irregular polygons — mostly hexagons — whose orientations are correlated among neighbours. But studies have disagreed over whether the important alignment is in the orientations of all the polygon edges or in the cells’ longest axes. Reporting in Nature Physics, Josep-Maria Armengol-Collado and colleagues have resolved this debate, demonstrating that long-axis alignment governs at large scales and hexagon alignment dominates at scales closer to the single-cell level1.

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Fig. 1: Liquid crystalline order and defects in cell layers.

References

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  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Daniel Beller

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  1. Daniel Beller
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Correspondence to Daniel Beller.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Beller, D. Symmetry depends on scale in cellular monolayers. Nat. Phys. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02167-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02167-4

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