Modeling the rheology of dense biological tissues

Shear forces in tissues are prevalent in many important biological processes including embryonic development, organogenesis and tumor invasion. However, the intercellular transmission of shear forces and the rheological response of a tissue remains poorly understood. In this work, we use a minimal vertex-based model to investigate the rheology of confluent epithelial tissues. We systematically probe the effects single-cell stiffness, polarized cell motility and the strain rate on the monolayer stress. We also elucidate how the interplay of these parameters affect the cellular rearrangements such as T1 transitions and the statistics of cell shapes in the tissue.