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Minimisation of surface energy drives apical epithelial organisation and gives rise to Lewis’ law

Marco Kokic, Antonella Iannini, Gema Villa-Fombuena, Fernando Casares, View ORCID ProfileDagmar Iber
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/590729
Marco Kokic
1Department of Biosystems, Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), ETH Zurich, Mattenstraße 26, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
2Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Mattenstraße 26, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
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Antonella Iannini
3CABD, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain
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Gema Villa-Fombuena
3CABD, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain
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Fernando Casares
3CABD, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain
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Dagmar Iber
1Department of Biosystems, Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), ETH Zurich, Mattenstraße 26, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
2Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Mattenstraße 26, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
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  • ORCID record for Dagmar Iber
  • For correspondence: dagmar.iber@bsse.ethz.ch
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ABSTRACT

The packing of cells in epithelia exhibits striking regularities, regardless of the organism and organ. One of these regularities is expressed in Lewis’ law, which states that the average apical cell area is linearly related to the number of neighbours, such that cells with larger apical area have on average more neighbours. The driving forces behind the almost 100-year old Lewis’ law have remained elusive. We now provide evidence that the observed apical epithelial packing minimizes surface energy at the intercellular apical adhesion belt. Lewis’ law emerges because the apical cell surfaces then assume the most regular polygonal shapes within a contiguous lattice, thus minimising the average perimeter per cell, and thereby surface energy. We predict that the linear Lewis’ law generalizes to a quadratic law if the variability in apical areas is increased beyond what is normally found in epithelia. We confirm this prediction experimentally by generating heterogeneity in cell growth in Drosophila epithelia. Our discovery provides a link between epithelial organisation, cell division and growth and has implications for the general understanding of epithelial dynamics.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 27, 2019.
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Minimisation of surface energy drives apical epithelial organisation and gives rise to Lewis’ law
Marco Kokic, Antonella Iannini, Gema Villa-Fombuena, Fernando Casares, Dagmar Iber
bioRxiv 590729; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/590729
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Minimisation of surface energy drives apical epithelial organisation and gives rise to Lewis’ law
Marco Kokic, Antonella Iannini, Gema Villa-Fombuena, Fernando Casares, Dagmar Iber
bioRxiv 590729; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/590729

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