Abstract
Although cell shape can reflect the mechanical and biochemical properties of the cell and its environment, quantification of 3D cell shapes within 3D tissues remains difficult, typically requiring digital reconstruction from a stack of 2D images. We investigate a simple alternative technique to extract information about the 3D shapes of cells in a tissue; this technique connects the ensemble of 3D shapes in the tissue with the distribution of 2D shapes observed in independent 2D slices. Using cell vertex model geometries, we find that the distribution of 2D shapes allows clear determination of the mean value of a 3D shape index. We analyze the errors that may arise in practice in the estimation of the mean 3D shape index from 2D imagery and find that typically only a few dozen cells in 2D imagery are required to reduce uncertainty below 2%. Even though we developed the method for isotropic animal tissues, we demonstrate it on an anisotropic plant tissue. This framework could also be naturally extended to estimate additional 3D geometric features and quantify their uncertainty in other materials.
Highlights
Over the past decade, improved live-imaging techniques including multi-photon confocal [1] and light sheet microscopy [2] have dramatically altered our ability to quantify tissue architecture in in vivo and in vitro biological systems
We focus on determining whether the mean 3D shape index, which models suggest is strongly correlated with tissue mechanics, can be inferred from the 2D shape index, we explore other 2D and 3D shape descriptors as well
We focus on the location of the peak in the 2D shape index (p 2D) and the half-width-at-half-max (HWHM) to minimize contributions of the universal tail
Summary
Over the past decade, improved live-imaging techniques including multi-photon confocal [1] and light sheet microscopy [2] have dramatically altered our ability to quantify tissue architecture in in vivo and in vitro biological systems. Quite a bit of analysis and modeling has focused on confluent monolayers, where there are no gaps or overlaps between cells. These two-dimensional sheets of tissue are often studied in cell culture systems [3,4,5] and can be found during embryonic development [6, 7]. Researchers have developed a suite of mechanical inference techniques to estimate interfacial tensions and pressures from detailed images of cell shapes [6, 8, 9].
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