Glass Art, Physics, and Marine Biology: Outreach using the Glass Shop as a Laboratory for Tissue Biophysics in Marine Animals

Glass art, physics, and marine biology are seemingly unrelated fields, but here we bring them together for the study of tissue mechanics in a marine animal. Manipulation of glass is an ancient art form that involves heating glass beyond its melting point, where it exhibits liquid characteristics, to create artistic structures, followed by annealing it to room temperature and recovering solid characteristics. The behavior of glass at its liquid-solid transition state has remarkable similarities to that of epithelial tissue under mechanical loading in a simple marine animal, Trichoplax adhaerens. This animal has a flat body plan consisting of two epithelial tissue layers enclosing a layer of fiber cells. In this work, our aim is to compare glassy dynamics and cellular strain in epithelial tissues of marine organisms. The choice of glass as a material to display tissue mechanics is motivated by glass being deformable at high temperatures in addition to exhibiting both ductile and brittle behaviors. Note that such specialized work is possible only due to the established techniques in glass shops. Previous experiments have shown that in T. adhaerens, at faster loading scales, ventral and dorsal fracture holes form in the epithelium. In-silico modelling of its tissue has revealed a ductile to brittle transition. In our experiments, glass is shaped in the form of cellular epithelium of the organism and is stretched at its melting point. The resultant structure represents tissue, under load, frozen at an arbitrary time point of cellular strain. Using this setup to model epithelial tissue behavior under lateral and radial stretch, preliminary area calculation of individual glass “cells” (canes) in the tissue was performed. The average cell area increased under load which confirms that glass “cell” experience strain under loading. Further strain analysis should show the effects of load on individual cells in a collective as expected from the perspective of tissue mechanics. The novel idea of using glass shops as a laboratory for visualizing and studying tissue mechanics promotes synergistic integration of Arts and Science which offers wonderful opportunities for inter-disciplinary education and broader outreach.