Rosette formations as symmetry-breaking events: theory and experiment
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 26, 2025
Abstract
Multicellular rosettes are observed in different situations such as
morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer progression. While some molecular
insights have been gained to explain the presence of these assemblies of five
or more cells around a common center, what are the tunable, global features
that favors/hinders their formation is still largely unknown. Here, we made use
of a Voronoi dynamical model to investigate the ingredients driving the
emergence of rosettes characterized by different degree of stability and
organization. We found that (i) breaking the local spatial symmetry of the
system, i.e., introducing curvature-inducing defects, allows for the formation
of rosette-like structures (ii) whose probability of formation depends on the
characteristic of the cellular layer. In particular, a trade-off between tissue
fluidity and single cell deformability dictates the assembly of transient
rosettes, that are strongly stabilized in the presence of cell alignment
interactions. To test our model predictions, we performed fluorescence
microscopy experiments on rosette-forming neural populations derived from
induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), finding significant agreement. Overall,
our work may set the stage to gain an unifying understanding of the plethora of
biophysical mechanisms involving the occurrence of rosette-like structure both
in physiology and their altered formation in pathology.
