#3 Tissues, shapes and springs - Exploring displacement in tissues

If you pull a rubber band and release it, it bounces back and forth for a while slowing down until it eventually stops, it has an elastic response. Now, if you try the same thing with Play-Doh you don’t get the same result, rather it deforms and stays deformed, not returning to the way it was. But you try it yourself, I encourage it. But all these examples show is that when we pull something, we don’t always get the same behavior. Sometimes we get elastic responses, sometimes we get viscous responses, and most of the times, we get a mix of the two. Biological tissues happen to be part of the group that has mixed, or viscoelastic behavior.

Cells in tissues come in all shapes, though usually only a few very particular kind of shapes. Why those shapes and not others? Well, it turns out the shape of cells in tissues is intrinsically linked to its physical properties, the same physical properties that determine its response.

Our goal for this summer project will be to study the relation between the geometric properties that characterize cell shape, and the viscoelastic response of tissues, and maybe answer the question no one ever asked: Is the skin more like a rubber band or more like Play-Doh?