Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting | Riga 2026

Active and Responsive Soft Matter: From Biological to Engineered Systems

Wednesday Speaker Abstracts

COMPRESSION INDUCED VORTICAL MOTION WITHIN AN EPITHELIAL SPHEROID Mingming Wu ; 1 Cornell University, Biological and Environmental Engineering, Ithaca, NY, USA Adaptivity is a hall mark of living tissue. Large scale cell collective motion is a unique way of adaptation under mechanical stress for growing tissue, including developing drosophila embryo and epithelial acini formation within a 3D ECM. Here, we present a large scale vortical motion within a non-tumorigenic tumor spheorid induced by a mechanical compression. Interestingly, we found that compression induces a giant vortex within the non-tumorigenic epithelial spheroids (MCF10A), but no coordinated motion was observed in the malignant tumor spheroids (MDA-MB-231 cells). Using a microfluidic compression device, we find that the voticity strength depends on compression strain in a biphasic manner, and it is moderately correlated with the spheroid's ability to invade into the surrounding extracellular matrix. This work is in collaboration with Manli Liu, YoungJun Suh, YuKun Sun, Chris Roh at Cornell University, and Jeffrey Segall at Einstein College of Medicine, and is supported by the National Institute of Health R01CA221346).

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