Dynamic morphoskeletons in development

Significance Coordinated cell migration is a hallmark of tissue morphogenesis during development and emerges from the combination of local cell behaviors and distributed chemo-mechanical interactions integrated across many spatial and temporal scales. A challenge in the field is to predict developmental outcomes of tissue morphogenesis using cellular trajectories. We provide a rigorous kinematic framework to analyze cell motion and identify robust multicellular attractors and repellers in space and time. Our results yield a scheme for comparing different morphogenetic phenotypes and help bridge the gap between bottom-up and top-down modeling approaches to morphogenesis.