Related papers: Blastocoel morphogenesis: a biophysics perspective
Deformations of cell sheets during morphogenesis are driven by developmental processes such as cell division and cell shape changes. In morphoelastic shell theories of development, these processes appear as variations of the intrinsic…
The concept of internal anatomical asymmetry is familiar; usually in humans the heart is on the left and the liver is on the right, however how does the developing embryo know to produce this consistent laterality? Symmetry breaking…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
Many organs of higher organisms are heavily branched structures and arise by an at first sight similar process of branching morphogenesis. Yet the regulatory components and local interactions that have been identified differ greatly in…
The understanding of morphogenesis in living organisms has been renewed by tremendous progressin experimental techniques that provide access to cell-scale, quantitative information both on theshapes of cells within tissues and on the genes…
Proper heart morphogenesis requires a delicate balance between hemodynamic forces, myocardial activity, morphogen gradients, and epigenetic signaling, all of which are coupled with genetic regulatory networks. Recently both in vivo and in…
Cells can withstand hostile environmental conditions manifest as large mechanical forces such as pressure gradients and/or shear stresses by dynamically changing their shape. Such conditions are realized in the Schlemm's canal of the eye…
Spatial distributions of morphogens provide positional information in developing systems, but how the distributions are established and maintained remains an open problem. Transport by diffusion has been the traditional mechanism, but…
Recent mathematical fluid dynamics models have shed light into an outstanding problem in reproductive biology: why do spermatozoa cells show a 'preference' for swimming near to surfaces? In this paper we review quantitative approaches to…
Across metazoans, early embryos exhibit a strikingly conserved slowing down of their cell duplication speed, despite widely varying developmental paces and underlying molecular mechanisms. Here we show that this common behavior arises…
Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we…
The growth, form, and division of prebiotic vesicles, membraneous bags of fluid of varying components and shapes is hypothesized to have served as the substrate for the origin of life. The dynamics of these out-of-equilibrium structures is…
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…
The influence of the internal structure of a biological cell (e.g., a leukocyte) on its dynamics and rheology is not yet fully understood. By using 2D numerical simulations of a bilamellar vesicle (BLV) consisting of two vesicles as a cell…
Patterns in biology can be considered as predetermined, or arising from a self-organizing instability. Variability in the pattern can thus be interpreted as a trace of an instability, growing out from noise. Variability can thus hint toward…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
Embryogenesis is a multiscale process during which developmental symmetry breaking transitions give rise to complex multicellular organisms. Recent advances in high-resolution live-cell microscopy provide unprecedented insights into the…
Cells undergo dramatic morphological changes during embryogenesis, yet how these changes affect the formation of ordered tissues remains elusive. Here, we show that a phase transition leading to the formation of a nematic liquid crystal…
Tissue deformations during morphogenesis can be active, driven by internal processes, or passive, resulting from stresses applied at their boundaries. Here, we introduce the Drosophila hindgut primordium as a model for studying…
Leptogenesis is a class of scenarios in which the cosmic baryon asymmetry originates from an initial lepton asymmetry generated in the decays of heavy sterile neutrinos in the early Universe. We explain why leptogenesis is an appealing…