Physics of Morphogenesis

Morphogenesis is a developmental process through which plants and animals acquire their shape and form. Although Biology has identified many of the key genes and cellular mechanisms of morphogenesis, the question of how Living Matter encodes the geometry of the shapes that it generates remains an open problem. This talk will focus on the interplay of physical forces and genetically encoded regulation that underly morphogenic processes. Specifically, the talk will describe how mechanical self-organization on cellular scale acts to convert spatial patterns of developmental gene expression into controlled transformation of tissue shape. We will see that i) simple ideas from Physics go far in explaining non-trivial behavior of tissues, and that ii) “active mechanics” encountered in tissue morphogenesis pushes the envelope of continuum mechanics beyond what we have learned from Landau and Lifshitz.

Speaker: Boris Shraiman, UC Santa Barbara