Dispersible hydrogel force sensors reveal patterns of solid mechanical stress in multicellular spheroid cultures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding how forces orchestrate tissue formation requires technologies to map internal tissue stress at cellular length scales. Here, we develop ultrasoft mechanosensors that visibly deform under less than 10 Pascals of cell-generated stress. By incorporating these mechanosensors into multicellular spheroids, we capture the patterns of internal stress that arise during spheroid formation. We experimentally demonstrate the spontaneous generation of a tensional 'skin', only a few cell layers thick, at the spheroid surface, which correlates with activation of mechanobiological signalling pathways, and balances a compressive stress profile within the tissue. These stresses develop through cell-driven mechanical compaction at the tissue periphery, and suggest that the tissue formation process plays a critically important role in specifying mechanobiological function. The broad applicability of this technique should ultimately provide a quantitative basis to design tissues that leverage the mechanical activity of constituent cells to evolve towards a desired form and function.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".