Chick is great for modelling and analysis because its nearly flat, but what about curved epithelial tissues? @sreejithsanthosh.bsky.social developed open-source code to extract DMs from arbitrary curved and dynamic surfaces.

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Morphogenesis also affects which cells can communicate. Recasting morphogen advection-diffusion equations in cells’ moving frames, we found that DMs identify where flows most strongly affect diffusive fluxes, reshaping cells’ morphogen signaling ranges.

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Model/experiment perturbations can also reshape the Attractor (primitive streak) into a ring, point, or thicker line, resembling other vertebrate gastrulation modes! (Note: Attractors aren’t actively attracting cells; they show where cells converged)

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To figure out how these structures emerge from >60k cells, we built a continuum mechanochemical model coupling velocities to dynamic myosin cables and contractility. The model predicts the flows, and the embryo’s transition from circular to pear-shaped.

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Dynamical systems theory gives us tools to extract robust, frame-invariant kinematic features—coherent structures—from velocity or trajectory data. In #DevBio, the relevant ones are attractors and repellers, constituting the Dynamic Morphoskeleton (DM).

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Which features of tissue flows are most robust and how do they emerge from #EpithelialMechanics?

I’m @alex-plum.bsky.social (@mattiaserra.bsky.social group) and I’ll be sharing some papers on characterizing and controlling avian gastrulation flows.