Rigidity of epithelial tissues as a double optimization problem

How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solidlike to a fluidlike state or vice versa. Here we introduce a way for a tissue described by a vertex model to tune its rigidity by using “tunable degrees of freedom.” We use the vertex model elastic energy as a cost function and the cell stiffnesses, target shapes, and target areas as different sets of degrees of freedom describing cell-cell interactions that can be tuned to minimize the cost function. We show that the rigidity transition is unaffected when cell stiffnesses are treated as tunable degrees of freedom. When preferred shapes or areas are treated as tunable degrees of freedom, however, induced spatial correlations in target cell shapes or areas shift the rigidity transition. These observations suggest that tissues can coordinate changes in cell-scale properties, treated here as tunable degrees of freedom, to achieve desired tissue-scale behaviors.