A scutoid is a particular type of geometric solid between two parallel surfaces. The boundary of each of the surfaces (and of all the other parallel surfaces between them) either is a polygon or resembles a polygon, but is not necessarily planar, and the vertices of the two end polygons are joined by either a curve or a Y-shaped connection on at least one of the edges, but not necessarily all of the edges. Scutoids present at least one vertex between these two planes. Scutoids are not necessarily convex, and lateral faces are not necessarily planar, so several scutoids can pack together to fill all the space between the two parallel surfaces. They may be more generally described as a mix between a frustum and a prismatoid. [1] [2]
The object was first described by Gómez-Gálvez et al. in a paper entitled Scutoids are a geometrical solution to three-dimensional packing of epithelia, and published in July 2018. [1] Officially, the name scutoid was coined because of its resemblance to the shape of the scutum and scutellum in some insects, such as beetles in the subfamily Cetoniinae. [1] Unofficially, Clara Grima has stated that while working on the project, the shape was temporarily called an Escu-toid as a joke after the biology group leader Luis M. Escudero. [3] [4] Since his last name, "Escudero", means "squire" (from Latin scutarius = shield-bearer), the temporary name was modified slightly to become "scutoid".
The shape, however odd, is a building block of multicellular organisms; complex life might never have emerged on Earth without it.
— Alan Burdick, We Are All Scutoids: A Brand New Shape, Explained [2]
Epithelial cells adopt the "scutoidal shape" under certain circumstances. [1] In epithelia, cells can 3D-pack as scutoids, facilitating tissue curvature. This is fundamental to the shaping of the organs during development. [1] [5] [6]
"Scutoid is a prismatoid to which one extra mid-level vertex has been added. This extra vertex forces some of the "faces" of the resulting object to curve. This means that Scutoids are not polyhedra, because not all of their faces are planar. ... For the computational biologists who created/discovered the Scutoid, the key property of the shape is that it can combine with itself and other geometric objects like frustums to create 3D packings of epithelial cells."
- Laura Taalman [7] [8]
Cells in the developing lung epithelium have been found to have more complex shapes than the term "scutoid", inspired by the simple scutellum of beetles, suggests. [9] When "scutoids" exhibit multiple Y-shaped connections or vertices along their axis, they have therefore been called "punakoids" instead, [10] as their shape is more reminiscent of the Pancake Rocks in Punakaiki, New Zealand.
The scutoid explains how epithelial cells (the cells that line and protect organs such as the skin) efficiently pack in three dimensions. [1] As epithelial tissue bends or grows, the cells have to take on new shapes to pack together using the least amount of energy possible, and until the scutoid's discovery, it was assumed that epithelial cells packed in mostly frustums, as well as other prism-like shapes. Now, with the knowledge of how epithelial cells pack, it opens up many new possibilities in terms of artificial organs. The scutoid may be applied to making better artificial organs, allowing for things like effective organ replacements, recognizing whether a person's cells are packing correctly or not, and ways to fix that problem.Parker 2018
In geometry, every polyhedron is associated with a second dual structure, where the vertices of one correspond to the faces of the other, and the edges between pairs of vertices of one correspond to the edges between pairs of faces of the other. Such dual figures remain combinatorial or abstract polyhedra, but not all can also be constructed as geometric polyhedra. Starting with any given polyhedron, the dual of its dual is the original polyhedron.
In geometry, a polyhedron is a three-dimensional figure with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices.
In geometry, a prism is a polyhedron comprising an n-sided polygon base, a second base which is a translated copy of the first, and n other faces, necessarily all parallelograms, joining corresponding sides of the two bases. All cross-sections parallel to the bases are translations of the bases. Prisms are named after their bases, e.g. a prism with a pentagonal base is called a pentagonal prism. Prisms are a subclass of prismatoids.
Epithelium or epithelial tissue is a thin, continuous, protective layer of cells with little extracellular matrix. An example is the epidermis, the outermost layer of the skin. Epithelial (mesothelial) tissues line the outer surfaces of many internal organs, the corresponding inner surfaces of body cavities, and the inner surfaces of blood vessels. Epithelial tissue is one of the four basic types of animal tissue, along with connective tissue, muscle tissue and nervous tissue. These tissues also lack blood or lymph supply. The tissue is supplied by nerves.
A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries.
In mathematics, a regular polytope is a polytope whose symmetry group acts transitively on its flags, thus giving it the highest degree of symmetry. In particular, all its elements or j-faces — cells, faces and so on — are also transitive on the symmetries of the polytope, and are themselves regular polytopes of dimension j≤ n.
Euclidean plane tilings by convex regular polygons have been widely used since antiquity. The first systematic mathematical treatment was that of Kepler in his Harmonices Mundi.
In geometry, the triangular tiling or triangular tessellation is one of the three regular tilings of the Euclidean plane, and is the only such tiling where the constituent shapes are not parallelogons. Because the internal angle of the equilateral triangle is 60 degrees, six triangles at a point occupy a full 360 degrees. The triangular tiling has Schläfli symbol of {3,6}.
Geometric graph theory in the broader sense is a large and amorphous subfield of graph theory, concerned with graphs defined by geometric means. In a stricter sense, geometric graph theory studies combinatorial and geometric properties of geometric graphs, meaning graphs drawn in the Euclidean plane with possibly intersecting straight-line edges, and topological graphs, where the edges are allowed to be arbitrary continuous curves connecting the vertices; thus, it can be described as "the theory of geometric and topological graphs". Geometric graphs are also known as spatial networks.
The tetrahedral-octahedral honeycomb, alternated cubic honeycomb is a quasiregular space-filling tessellation in Euclidean 3-space. It is composed of alternating regular octahedra and tetrahedra in a ratio of 1:2.
The circle packing theorem describes the possible tangency relations between circles in the plane whose interiors are disjoint. A circle packing is a connected collection of circles whose interiors are disjoint. The intersection graph of a circle packing is the graph having a vertex for each circle, and an edge for every pair of circles that are tangent. If the circle packing is on the plane, or, equivalently, on the sphere, then its intersection graph is called a coin graph; more generally, intersection graphs of interior-disjoint geometric objects are called tangency graphs or contact graphs. Coin graphs are always connected, simple, and planar. The circle packing theorem states that these are the only requirements for a graph to be a coin graph:
In polyhedral combinatorics, a branch of mathematics, Steinitz's theorem is a characterization of the undirected graphs formed by the edges and vertices of three-dimensional convex polyhedra: they are exactly the 3-vertex-connected planar graphs. That is, every convex polyhedron forms a 3-connected planar graph, and every 3-connected planar graph can be represented as the graph of a convex polyhedron. For this reason, the 3-connected planar graphs are also known as polyhedral graphs.
In geometry of 4 dimensions or higher, a double pyramid, duopyramid, or fusil is a polytope constructed by 2 orthogonal polytopes with edges connecting all pairs of vertices between the two. The term fusil is used by Norman Johnson as a rhombic-shape. The term duopyramid was used by George Olshevsky, as the dual of a duoprism.
In computer graphics, tessellation is the dividing of datasets of polygons presenting objects in a scene into suitable structures for rendering. Especially for real-time rendering, data is tessellated into triangles, for example in OpenGL 4.0 and Direct3D 11.
In graph drawing and geometric graph theory, a Tutte embedding or barycentric embedding of a simple, 3-vertex-connected, planar graph is a crossing-free straight-line embedding with the properties that the outer face is a convex polygon and that each interior vertex is at the average of its neighbors' positions. If the outer polygon is fixed, this condition on the interior vertices determines their position uniquely as the solution to a system of linear equations. Solving the equations geometrically produces a planar embedding. Tutte's spring theorem, proven by W. T. Tutte, states that this unique solution is always crossing-free, and more strongly that every face of the resulting planar embedding is convex. It is called the spring theorem because such an embedding can be found as the equilibrium position for a system of springs representing the edges of the graph.
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.
Lewis' law gives a relationship between the size and the shape of epithelial cells. It states that the average apical area of an epithelial cell is linearly related to its neighbor number . It is a phenomenological law that was first described in the cucumber epidermis by the morphologist Frederic Thomas Lewis in 1928. The simplest version of Lewis' law can be expressed as , which reads: The average apical area of a cell with neighbors is proportional to its shape. While neighbor number distributions change throughout organogenesis, the average neighbor number of epithelial cells is , which can be traced back to Euler's formula for polygons.
Clara Isabel Grima Ruiz is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Seville, specializing in computational geometry. She is known for her research on scutoids and for her popularization of mathematics.
Barry James Thompson is an Australian and British developmental biologist and cancer biologist. Thompson is known for identifying genes, proteins and mechanisms involved in epithelial polarity, morphogenesis and cell signaling via the Wnt and Hippo signaling pathways, which have key roles in human cancer.