NEW Preprint !
Very happy to announce the preprint of Mathieu Le Verge—Serandour, first PhD student of the lab: A hydro-osmotic coarsening theory of biological cavity formation
The formation of biological cavities has been studied mostly in the context of apical lumens. Here, we model the emergence of alternative basolateral biological cavities, such as blastocoels in early embryos or cysts in tissues. Inspired by experimental observations in mouse embryos, where the blastocoel emerges from a myrial of microlumens located at cell-cell interfaces, we propose a generic physical model for the coarsening of biological compartments coupled hydro-osmotically. Such coarsening process is naturally expected to lead to a single compartment, but the influence of osmotic exchanges has not yet been studied from a physical perspective. Using numerical simulations we delineate the physical requirements for the formation and spatial positioning of a single cavity in a cell aggregate and we predict robust and easily measurable scaling laws characterizing the underlying dynamics.
Our work highlights the essential roles of hydraulic and osmotic flows in shaping tissues and embryos, with expected applications in lumenogenesis, oogenesis and embryogenesis.