Fig. 3

Estimation of persistence length for in vivo microridges.

a A magenta box demarcates the 2D sub-image of a skeletonized microridge branch for estimation of L_p. b Microridge skeleton contours (blue) were smoothened using a Gaussian fit (red curve). The inset shows a microridge skeleton (blue line) with the endpoints of the contour (magenta) used to obtain the boundary trace that returned the discrete x–y coordinates. c A cubic spline interpolation on the Gaussian smoothened microridge trace contours preserved the sequence of points to give several intermediate points. d Tangent angle (θ_k) along the length (ℓ) of the microridge. e Rescaled κ_s along the length (ℓ) of the microridge contour. f Distribution of κ_s of microridges from 1052 cells (293, 1084, and 125 from the flank, yolk, and head, respectively) fitted to a Gaussian distribution (red line trace), whose variance gives an estimate of the effective persistence length (L_p) as ~6.1 μm.