
Engineered Tissue Folding by Mechanical Compaction of the Mesenchyme - indescions_2018
http://www.cell.com/developmental-cell/fulltext/S1534-5807(17)30989-9
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jfarlow
Congratulations! Very cool.

The goopy proteinaceous environment ("Extra Cellular Matrix") between living
cells has such a strong effect on the communication and structure of tissues.
And using concepts like tension and adhesion as signals, the ECM seems to act
to communicate and coordinate cells across long distances.

The work here is some of the more 'complicated' 3D tissue engineering - done
in an effort to understand the generic organizational design rules of tissue
construction. Their control of multiple cell types, in 3D, at single-cell
resolution lets them start to ask (and answer) interesting questions about how
to go about designing (and altering) tissues of the kind that we are made of.

And with some of that knowledge those communities (tissues) even seem
engineerable:

"The predictable relationship between strain and curvature observed in these
cell-ECM composites allowed us to program the autonomous folding of tissues
into a variety of 3D architectures bearing striking similarity to structures
found in vivo, as well as into entirely novel geometries. The folding process
is analogous to the autonomous folding of abiotic materials into complex
shapes."

