bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.18.435928; this version posted March 19, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. 1 Mechanical bistability enabled by ectodermal compression facilitates 2 Drosophila mesoderm invagination 3 4 Hanqing Guo1, Michael Swan2, Shicheng Huang1 and Bing He1* 5 6 1. Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 7 2. Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 8 *Correspondence:
[email protected] 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.18.435928; this version posted March 19, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. 9 Abstract 10 Apical constriction driven by non-muscle myosin II (“myosin”) provides a well-conserved 11 mechanism to mediate epithelial folding. It remains unclear how contractile forces near the 12 apical surface of a cell sheet drive out-of-plane bending of the sheet and whether myosin 13 contractility is required throughout folding. By optogenetic-mediated acute inhibition of myosin, 14 we find that during Drosophila mesoderm invagination, myosin contractility is critical to prevent 15 tissue relaxation during the early, “priming” stage of folding but is dispensable for the actual 16 folding step after the tissue passes through a stereotyped transitional configuration, suggesting 17 that the mesoderm is mechanically bistable during gastrulation. Combining computer modeling 18 and experimental measurements, we show that the observed mechanical bistability arises from an 19 in-plane compression from the surrounding ectoderm, which promotes mesoderm invagination 20 by facilitating a buckling transition.