In developing embryos, cells move a lot! Plenty of that movement is random. Is random cell mixing a feature or bug for tissue patterning? Turns out, it’s both! Excited to share the 1st preprint from my postdoc w/ Sean Megason @seanemcgeary.bsky.social and Allon Klein. 1/20 doi.org/10.1101/2025... - ThreadSky

rikkigarner.bsky.social • 38 days ago

In developing embryos, cells move a lot! Plenty of that movement is random. Is random cell mixing a feature or bug for tissue patterning? Turns out, it’s both! Excited to share the 1st preprint from my postdoc w/ Sean Megason @seanemcgeary.bsky.social and Allon Klein. 1/20 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.01.640992

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hugheslabpenn.bsky.social•37 days ago

Cool thread Rikki, the adhesion and motility correlation makes sense and neat to see the data collapse onto it. cancer invasion / emt would show negative corr right? Also wondering about when global dev rate is faster or slower, local self-organization has to match rate of events happening nearby

rikkigarner.bsky.social•37 days ago

Thanks Alex! I'm really excited to see how this applies to EMT! You're right, I would expect a negative trend as EMT progresses, which would erase stable tissue patterns via increased in random cell mixing.

rikkigarner.bsky.social•37 days ago

Re: developmental rates, I would love to see whether organisms that develop faster also have faster cell motility! Right now I'm looking at zebrafish, which develop faster at high temperatures and also have a good amount of random cell motility!

rikkigarner.bsky.social•37 days ago

I would love to adapt this experiment growing each half of a zebrafish embryo at a different temperature, and look for differences in motility betwen the halves. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03509

kathleengordon.bsky.social•37 days ago

Cool!!

rikkigarner.bsky.social•37 days ago

Thanks!!

lsprahl.bsky.social•37 days ago

Congratulations Rikki!

rikkigarner.bsky.social•37 days ago

Thanks Louis!

rikkigarner.bsky.social•38 days ago

What determines how quickly cells can move through a tissue in the first place? A lot of things! But, to make things simple, we often sum it up as “tissue fluidity”. It’s an analogy: cells in a tissue act like molecules in a fluid… 2/20

rikkigarner.bsky.social•38 days ago

In a high fluidity tissue, cells are free to move and rearrange – just like how molecules diffuse around in a liquid. In a low fluidity tissue, the cells are stuck in place and can’t move – like molecules in a solid. 3/20

rikkigarner.bsky.social•38 days ago

In a developing embryo, tissues readily transition back and forth between being more fluid-like or more solid-like. Tissue fluidity acts kind of like a thermostat 🌡️ that embryos can use to increase or decrease how much cells can mix with each other. 4/20

rikkigarner.bsky.social•38 days ago

As they move, cells build breathtakingly beautiful patterns in the embryo – stripes, checkerboards, spheres, tubes… Here are just a few of my favorite examples. Like the members of a marching band, cells rearrange into formations to build the embryo. 5/20

rikkigarner.bsky.social•38 days ago

So how does tissue fluidity affect the ability of cells to build patterns? To answer this question, we built a model incorporating both tissue fluidity and cell sorting. As cells move around (based on the tissue fluidity), they group together with cells of the same cell type. 6/20

rikkigarner.bsky.social•38 days ago

The model is based on a powerful tool in physics called the Ising model. Here’s an example. On top, each cell is colored by a unique ID, so you can visualize cell mixing. On the bottom, cells are colored by their cell type, so you can watch them sort. Beautiful, right? 7/20

halloulab.bsky.social•38 days ago

Congratulations on that elegant and very exciting study @rikkigarner.bsky.social and to all authors 🤩👏!!

You might be interested in looking at our last paper where we used spatial mechano-transcriptomics & simulations to look at similar questions in embryo sections:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02618-1

rikkigarner.bsky.social•38 days ago

Very cool! Thanks for sharing Adrien!

kongjuzhu.bsky.social•36 days ago

Cool! Congrats!

rikkigarner.bsky.social•36 days ago

Thanks Kongju!

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