Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 349

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 37 of the 37 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Localized cell death focuses mechanical forces during 3D patterning in a biofilm

Open access
Asally, Munehiro, Kittisopikul, Mark, Rué, Pau, Du, Yingjie, Hu, Zhenxing, Çağatay, Tolga, Robinson, Andra B., Lu, Hongbing, Garcia-Ojalvo, Jordi, Süel, Gürol M.·2012·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

From microbial biofilm communities to multicellular organisms, 3D macroscopic structures develop through poorly understood interplay between cellular processes and mechanical forces. Investigating wrinkled biofilms of Bacillus subtilis , we discovered a pattern of localized cell death that spatially focuses mechanical forces, and thereby initiates wrinkle formation. Deletion of genes implicated in biofilm development, together with mathematical modeling, revealed that ECM production underlies the localization of cell death. Simultaneously with cell death, we quantitatively measured mechanical stiffness and movement in WT and mutant biofilms. Results suggest that localized cell death provides an outlet for lateral compressive forces, thereby promoting vertical mechanical buckling, which subsequently leads to wrinkle formation. Guided by these findings, we were able to generate artificial wrinkle patterns within biofilms. Formation of 3D structures facilitated by cell death may underlie self-organization in other developmental systems, and could enable engineering of macroscopic structures from cell populations.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1073/pnas.1212429109

Cites

37 of 37 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 37 references

Cited by

See all 349

Metadata

Authors
Asally, M., Kittisopikul, M., Rué, P., Du, Y., Hu, Z., Çağatay, T., Robinson, A. B., Lu, H., Garcia-Ojalvo, J., & Süel, G. M.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2012-09-24
Volume
109
Issue
46
Pages
18891-18896
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W2022288015
Cited by
349
References
37
FWCI
8.19
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Localized cell death focuses mechanical forces during 3D patterning in a biofilm. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1212429109
The paper
Asally, M., Kittisopikul, M., Rué, P., Du, Y., Hu, Z., Çağatay, T., Robinson, A. B., Lu, H., Garcia-Ojalvo, J., & Süel, G. M. (2012). Localized cell death focuses mechanical forces during 3D patterning in a biofilm. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1212429109

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.