Covariant Active Hydrodynamics of Shape-Changing Epithelial Monolayers

Abstract

During the early-stages of embryo development, morphogenesis--- the emergence of shape and form in living organisms--- is almost exclusively associated with monolayers of tightly bound epithelial cells. To understand how such tissues change their shape, we construct a fully covariant active-hydrodynamic theory. At the cellular scale, stresses arise from apical contractility, mechanical response and the constraint of constant cell volume. Tissue-scale deformations emerge due to the balance between such cell-autonomous stresses and the displacement and shear of a low Reynolds number embedding fluid. Tissues with arbitrary curvature or shape can be described, providing a general framework for epithelial monolayer morphology. Analysis of the stability of flat monolayers reveals two generic shape instabilities: passive constrained-buckling, and actively-driven tissue deformation. The active instability can be further categorised into two types, corresponding to cell shape changes that are either "squamous to columnar" or "regular-prism to truncated-pyramid". The deformations resulting from the latter qualitatively reproduce in vivo observations of the onset of both mesoderm and posterior midgut invaginations, which take place during gastrulation in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.