Morphogenesis of membrane invaginations in spherical confinement

Abstract

We study the morphology of a fluid membrane in spherical confinement. When the area of the membrane is slightly larger than the area of the outer container, a single axisymmetric invagination is observed. For higher area, self-contact occurs: the invagination breaks symmetry and deforms into an ellipsoid-like shape connected to its outer part via a small slit. For even higher areas, a second invagination forms inside the original invagination. The folding patterns observed could constitute basic building blocks in the morphogenesis of biological tissues and organelles.

4 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (3)

• Instabilities of monolayered epithelia: shape and structure of villi and crypts
• Viscous regularization and r-adaptive remeshing for finite element analysis of lipid membrane mechanics
• Self-contact and instabilities in the anisotropic growth of elastic membranes

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