Original title: Length scale of cellular activity determines signatures of epithelial remodeling
Sahil Islam, Anupam Gupta, Mohd. Suhail Rizvi · August 2026
Living tissues can melt from solid-like sheets into flowing, fluid-like shapes during healing and growth. Scientists often lump all the cell forces that cause this together into one generic idea. To explore this, researchers used a computer model of cells to test four different active force mechanisms across different size scales: apolar motility, polar motility, fluctuating contractility, and mechanochemical regulationCell activity controlled by both mechanical forces and chemical signals.. Every mechanism caused the exact same overall change, reshaping a solid rectangular tissue into a fluid round droplet. However, each mode took a unique path. They produced different speeds of cell neighbor swaps, cell eliminations, and collective motions. Measuring how cell movement velocities correlate across space completely separated all four force types, giving scientists a way to identify these forces directly from live-cell imaging.
Imagine getting a messy room to look tidy. You could vacuum in long straight stripes, dust in small circles, or shove everything into a closet. The room ends up the same, but the streaks and smudges left behind reveal which method you used. In this paper, a tissue reaches the same fluid-like shape through four different kinds of cell behavior, and the way neighboring cells move together is the telltale trace.
During development and repair, tissues must turn fluid-like to change shape. This happens through several microscopic mechanisms, and telling them apart experimentally has been difficult. This work suggests that standard live-cell imaging may be enough, because each mechanism leaves a unique pattern in how cells move.
The abstract doesn't say whether the predicted velocity signatures actually appear in living tissue; the study is based on an active vertex model, so the results are computational predictions. It also only compares four mechanisms, leaving out other possible modes of activity.
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Length scale of cellular activity determines signatures of epithelial remodeling — Sahil Islam, Anupam Gupta, Mohd. Suhail Rizvi
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.