Abstract
In this study, we present novel schemes for the reconstruction of cellular morphology and the inference of forces in the early C. elegans embryo. We have developed and bench-marked a morphological reconstruction scheme that transforms live-imaging of cellular membranes into a point cloud of smoothed surface patches, which facilitates accurate estimation of membrane curvatures and the angles between membranes.
Assuming an isotropic and homogeneous distribution of tensions along a membrane, we infer a pattern of forces that are 7% deviated from force balance at edges, and 10% deviated from the Young-Laplace relation at membrane faces. We have also demonstrated the stability of our scheme by sensitivity analysis of the coefficient matrices involved and the reproducibility of our image-analysis and force inference pipeline.