Image-based force inference by biomechanical simulation.

During morphogenesis, cells precisely generate forces that drive cell shape changes and cellular motion. These forces predominantly arise from contractility of the actomyosin cortex, allowing for cortical tension, protrusion formation, and cell division. Image-based force inference can derive such forces from microscopy images, without complicated and time-consuming experimental set-ups.

Cell shape characterization, alignment, and comparison using FlowShape.

Motivation: The shape of a cell is tightly controlled, and reflects important processes including actomyosin activity, adhesion properties, cell differentiation, and polarization. Hence, it is informative to link cell shape to genetic and other perturbations. However, most currently used cell shape descriptors capture only simple geometric features such as volume and sphericity.