Related papers: Symmetry-Breaking in Plant Stems
Due to the fact that only matter fields have phase, frequently is believed that the gauge principle can induce gauge fields only in quantum systems. But this is not necessary. This paper, of pedagogical scope, presents a classical system…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
We introduce a model of traveling agents ({\it e.g.} frugivorous animals) who feed on randomly located vegetation patches and disperse their seeds, thus modifying the spatial distribution of resources in the long term. It is assumed that…
The growth of plants is a hydromechanical phenomenon in which cells enlarge by absorbing water, while their walls expand and remodel under turgor-induced tension. In multicellular tissues, where cells are mechanically interconnected,…
Many cells exhibit large-scale active circulation of their entire fluid contents, a process termed cytoplasmic streaming. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in plant cells, often presenting strikingly regimented flow patterns. The…
How morphogenesis depends on cell properties is an active direction of research. Here, we focus on mechanical models of growing plant tissues, where microscopic (sub)cellular structure is taken into account. In order to establish links…
The origin of allometric scaling patterns that are multiples of 1/4 has long fascinated biologists. While not universal, scaling relationships with exponents that are close to multiples of 1/4 are common and have been described in all major…
We introduce the concept of seeding of crystallization in time by studying the dynamics of an ensemble of coupled continuous time crystals. We demonstrate that a single subsystem in a broken-symmetry phase acting as a nucleation center may…
Morphogenesis is the biological process that causes the emergence and changes of patterns (tissues and organs) in living organisms. It is a robust, self-organising mechanism, governed by Genetic Regulatory Networks (GRN), that hasn't been…
Since Charles Darwin's time, the study of climbing plants on a cylindrical stake has been the subject of numerous articles in plant biology. One of the main ideas for studying the coiling of an elastic plant stem is to consider the growth…
We introduce a simple tree growth process that gives rise to a new two-parameter family of discrete fragmentation trees that extends Ford's alpha model to multifurcating trees and includes the trees obtained by uniform sampling from…
We present a dynamic model based on the linear sigma model with constituent quarks that allows for studying the explicit propagation of fluctuations at a chiral critical point and a first-order phase transition. The coupled dynamics of the…
During organogenesis tissue grows and deforms. The growth processes are controlled by diffusible proteins, so-called morphogens. Many different patterning mechanisms have been proposed. The stereotypic branching program during lung…
Based on extensive study of a dynamical systems model of the development of a cell society, a novel theory for stem cell differentiation and its regulation is proposed as the ``chaos hypothesis''. Two fundamental features of stem cell…
Given any regularly varying dislocation measure, we identify a natural self-similar fragmentation tree as scaling limit of discrete fragmentation trees with unit edge lengths. As an application, we obtain continuum random tree limits of…
Cycling tissues such as the intestinal epithelium, germ line, and hair follicles, require a constant flux of differentiated cells. These tissues are maintained by a population of stem cells, which generate differentiated progenies and…
Eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens such as bacteria or viruses utilize the actin polymerization machinery to propel themselves forward. Thereby, the onset of motion and choice of direction may be the result of a spontaneous…
A rigorous methodology is proposed to study cell division data consisting in several observed genealogical trees of possibly different shapes. The procedure takes into account missing observations, data from different trees, as well as the…
Lotus leaves floating on water usually experience short-wavelength edge wrinkling that decays toward the center, while the leaves growing above water normally morph into a global bending cone shape with long rippled waves near the edge.…
Modeling the spontaneous evolution of morphology in natural systems and its preservation by proportionate growth remains a major scientific challenge. Yet, it is conceivable that if the basic mechanisms of growth and the coupled kinetic…