Understanding how tissues are organized in homeostasis is key to uncover the causes and mechanisms of pathological variations.
In Dr Luis Maria Escudero Cuadrado's lab, they combine Developmental Biology, Computational Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Biomedicine concepts to obtain relevant quantitative information about how living tissues are organized.
Following this general approach, they have investigated epithelial organization in three dimensions (3D). Epithelial cells have been traditionally depicted as prisms with polygonal apical and basal faces. Recently, they have found in a number of different epithelia, that cells exchange their neighbours along the apico-basal axis.
Importantly, this phenomenon is incompatible with the traditional view of epithelial cells as prisms and compels the cells to adopt a new geometrical shape that they name “scutoids”. These surprising results provide a more realistic framework to understand and explain the architecture of epithelia.
In this talk, Luis will present new lines of research that continue the work in epithelial organization and that open new avenues to investigate tissue packing problems in other systems.