A microfluidic mechano-chemostat for tissues and organisms reveals that confined growth is accompanied with increased macromolecular crowding.

Conventional culture conditions are oftentimes insufficient to study tissues, organisms, or 3D multicellular assemblies. They lack both dynamic chemical and mechanical control over the microenvironment. While specific microfluidic devices have been developed to address chemical control, they often do not allow the control of compressive forces emerging when cells proliferate in a confined environment.

DISSECT is a tool to segment and explore cell and tissue mechanics in highly deformed 3D epithelia.

Understanding morphogenesis strongly relies on the characterization of tissue topology and mechanical properties deduced from imaging data. The development of new imaging techniques offers the possibility to go beyond the analysis of mostly flat surfaces and image and analyze complex tissue organization in depth. An important bottleneck in this field is the need to analyze imaging datasets and extract quantifications not only of cell and tissue morphology but also of the cytoskeletal network's organization in an automatized way.

Mechano-biochemical marine stimulation of inversion, gastrulation, and endomesoderm specification in multicellular Eukaryota.

The evolutionary emergence of the primitive gut in Metazoa is one of the decisive events that conditioned the major evolutionary transition, leading to the origin of animal development. It is thought to have been induced by the specification of the endomesoderm (EM) into the multicellular tissue and its invagination (i.e.

Trans-scale mechanotransductive cascade of biochemical and biomechanical patterning in embryonic development: the light side of the force.

Embryonic development is made of complex tissue shape changes and cell differentiation tissue patterning. Both types of morphogenetic processes, respectively biomechanical and biochemical in nature, were historically long considered as disconnected. Evidences of the biochemical patterning control of morphogenesis accumulated during the last 3 decades.