Motility-Driven Viscoelastic Control of Tissue Morphology in Presomitic Mesoderm

Abstract

During development, embryonic tissues experience mechanical stresses ranging from cellular to supracellular length scales. In response, cells generate active forces that drive rearrangements, allowing the tissue to relax accumulated stresses. The nature of these responses depends strongly on the magnitude and duration of the deformation, giving rise to the tissues characteristic viscoelastic behavior. Although experiments have characterized tissue rheology in various contexts, simpler theoretical approaches that directly connect cellular activity to emergent rheological behavior are still limited. In this study, we employ a vertex-based model of epithelial tissue incorporating active force fluctuations in cell vertices to represent cell motility. We capture distinct rounding dynamics and motility-dependent timescales by benchmarking against experimental observations such as the bulging of presomitic mesoderm (PSM) explants driven by Fibroblast Growth Factor(FGF) gradients. Stress relaxation tests reveal rapid short-timescale relaxation alongside persistent longtimescale residual stresses that decrease from anterior to posterior (AP) region of the PSM. By applying oscillatory shear, we analyzed the resulting elastic and viscous responses, revealing motility dependence of storage and loss modulus. Finally, we introduce spatially patterned cues applied in a temporally pulsed manner, mimicking dynamic biochemical or mechanical signals during development. Our results show that while higher motility promotes tissue remodeling in response to these cues, this response is constrained by spatial scale; cellular-scale perturbations are relaxed irrespective of motility strength, preventing complete morphological adaptation.