3D multiscale shape analysis of nuclei and in-vivo elastic stress sensors allows force inference.

Abstract

The measurement of stresses and forces at the tissue level has proven to be an indispensable tool for the understanding of complex biological phenomena such as cancer invasion, embryo development or wound healing. One of the most versatile tools for force inference at the cell and tissue level are elastic force sensors, whose biocompatibility and tunable material properties make them suitable for many different experimental scenarios. The evaluation of those forces, however, is still a bottleneck due to the numerical methods seen in literature until now, which are usually slow and render low experimental yield. Here we present BeadBuddy, a ready-to-use platform for the evaluation of deformation and stresses from fluorescently labelled sensors within seconds. The strengths of BeadBuddy lie in the pre-computed analytical solutions of the elastic problem, the abstraction of data into Spherical Harmonics, and a simple user interface that creates a smooth workflow for force inference.