A scheme for 3-dimensional morphological reconstruction and force inference in the early C. elegans embryo [article]

Muzhi Xu, Yicong Wu, Hari Shroff, Min Wu, Madhav Mani
2017 bioRxiv   pre-print
In this study, we present novel schemes for the reconstruction of cellular morphology and the inference of forces in the early C. elegans embryo. We have developed and bench-marked a morphological reconstruction scheme that transforms live-imaging of cellular membranes into a point cloud of smoothed surface patches, which facilitates accurate estimation of membrane curvatures and the angles between membranes. Assuming an isotropic and homogeneous distribution of tensions along a membrane, we
more » ... er a pattern of forces that are 7% deviated from force balance at edges, and 10% deviated from the Young-Laplace relation at membrane faces. We have also demonstrated the stability of our scheme by sensitivity analysis of the coefficient matrices involved and the reproducibility of our image-analysis and force inference pipeline.
doi:10.1101/175166 fatcat:23pae5cydvf3vprvkpxp676j6m