Abstract
Many biological tissues are organized as epithelia (i.e., thin cell sheets). Herein, we present a technique to estimate the stress distribution and local material properties in an epithelial membrane. Circular holes are perforated through the tissue to determine the principal stretch ratios; experimentally measured changes in hole geometry are used in combination with finite element modeling to evaluate the stresses and constitutive response. The method is demonstratively applied to the embryonic chick blastoderm, since mechanical stresses have been identified as potential regulators of early development. Due to its small scale, other more traditional mechanical tests have proven intractable for this tissue.
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly, these experiments were the product of an early clinical investigation. A patient intent on suicide had presented with elliptically shaped chest wounds. It was unclear, however, whether these lesions were the doings of a circular awl as the patient contended, or, due to their elliptical shape, a penknife blade. To settle the matter, surgical experiments on cadavers were performed [5].
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Dr. Dmitry Voronov for his invaluable help with the perforation experiments presented herein. This work was supported by grant R01 HL083393 (LAT) from the National Institutes of Health.
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Varner, V.D., Taber, L.A. (2010). On Measuring Stress Distributions in Epithelia. In: Garikipati, K., Arruda, E. (eds) IUTAM Symposium on Cellular, Molecular and Tissue Mechanics. IUTAM Bookseries, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3348-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3348-2_4
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