Flow, dynamics and active fracture in hydraulic multicellular systems

Abstract

From interstitial space to luminal cavities, fluid pressure and flow can remodel, reshape and even redefine a biological tissue. Fluids can either govern or react to mechanical interactions between cells. However, measuring flows at cellular scales is difficult, which makes it challenging to understand tissue hydraulics. Here, we develop a theoretical approach that captures cellular mechanics and fluid flow in one framework. We find that hydraulics can drastically influence tissue behavior. Hydraulic coupling between cell shape and size governs a tissue's response to osmotic shock, while tuning a tissue's permeabilities can channel fluid either between or across cell membranes. In active tissues, hydraulics can suppress cell mobility to the point of fracture, where we discover a hydraulic ratchet that drives fluid out of cells to generate small luminal spaces. We find experimental evidence that hydraulics can suppress cell motion in early stage zebrafish embryos injected with a thickening agent, which indicates that hydraulics may generally govern the behaviors of many multicellular systems.