Related papers: Emergence of Function
Plant morphogenesis relies on dynamic growth deformations at the cell and tissue scales driven by osmotic fluxes. A mechanistic understanding of this phenomenon demands a physical framework that integrates cell imbibition, tissue mechanics,…
Collective phenomena emerge from the interaction of natural or artificial units with a complex organization. The interplay between structural patterns and dynamics might induce functional clusters that, in general, are different from…
In these Lecture Notes we aim at clarifying how soft matter physics, and herein notably statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics, can be engaged to understand and manipulate non-equilibrium systems consisting of numerous (microscopic)…
We investigate the dynamics of a network consisting of an array of identical cortical units with nearest neighbor interactions under periodic arousal. Each unit consists of two interconnected populations of neurons tuned to a state in which…
Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell…
Mechanical forces influence the dynamics of growing tissues. Computer simulations are employed to study the importance of interfacial effects in tissue competition. It was speculated that mechanical pressure determines the competition,…
Fluid pumping and the generation of electric current by living tissues are required during morphogenetic processes and for maintainance of homeostasis. How these flows emerge from active and passive ion transport in cells has been well…
During growth, tissue expands and deforms. Given its elastic properties, stresses emerge in an expanding and deforming tissue. Cell rearrangements can dissipate these stresses and numerous experiments confirm the viscoelastic properties of…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
The homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
Cells of the human body have nearly identical genome but exhibit very different phenotypes that allow them to carry out specific functions and react to changes in their surrounding environment. This division of labour is achieved by…
We present a hydrodynamic theory to describe shear flows in developing epithelial tissues. We introduce hydrodynamic fields corresponding to state properties of constituent cells as well as a contribution to overall tissue shear flow due to…
The concept of emergence, or synergy in its simplest form, is widely used but lacks a rigorous definition. Our work connects information and set theory to uncover the mathematical nature of synergy as the failure of distributivity. It…
A novel theory for cell differentiation is proposed, based on simulations with interacting artificial cells which have metabolic networks within, and divide into two when the final product is accumulated. Results of simulations with coupled…
By combining methods of kinetic and density functional theory, we present a description of molecular fluids which accounts for their microscopic structure and thermodynamic properties as well as for the hydrodynamic behavior. We focus on…
Endocytosis is an essential process by which cells internalize a piece of plasma membrane and material from the outside. In cells with turgor, pressure opposes membrane defor- mations, and increases the amount of force that has to be…
Formulating quantitative and predictive models for tissue development requires consideration of the complex, stochastic gene expression dynamics, its regulation via cell-to-cell interactions, and cell proliferation. Including all of these…
We measure different contributions to entropy production in a living functional epithelial tissue. We do this by extracting the functional dynamics of development while at the same time quantifying fluctuations. Using the translucent…