Cell Divisions Imprint Long Lasting Elastic Strain Fields in Epithelial Tissues

A hallmark of biological tissues, viewed as complex cellular materials, is the active generation of mechanical stresses by cellular processes, such as cell divisions. Each cellular event generates a force dipole that deforms the surrounding tissue. Therefore, a quantitative description of these force dipoles, and their consequences on tissue mechanics, is one of the central problems in understanding the overall tissue mechanics. In this work, we analyze previously published experimental data on fruit fly wing epithelia to quantitatively describe the deformation fields induced by a cell-scale force dipole. We find that the measured deformation field can be explained by a simple model of wing epithelium as a linearly elastic sheet. This allows us to infer the magnitude and dynamics of the mechanical forces generated by the cell divisions. In particular, we find that cell divisions exert a transient isotropic force dipole field, corresponding to the temporary localization of the cell nucleus to the tissue surface during the division, and traceless-symmetric force dipole field that remains detectable from the tissue strain field for up to about 3.5 h after the division. This is the timescale on which elastic strains are erased by other mechanical processes and therefore it corresponds to the tissue fluidization timescale. In summary, we have developed a method to infer force dipoles induced by cell divisions, by observing the strain field in the surrounding tissues. Using this method we quantitatively characterize mechanical forces generated during a cell division and their effects on the tissue mechanics.