Speaker
Description
Biological tissues grow under strong mechanical constraints, leading to curvature control of their rate of growth. However, elucidating how this emergent control arises from dynamic cellular processes such as cell proliferation, cell migration, and cell mechanics remains a major challenge. In this talk, I will present recent advances from cell-based mathematical models and their continuum limit, that help disentangle how curvature dependences of tissue growth emerge from collective crowding effects and individual cellular processes. These models suggest two main mechanisms by which cells at a tissue interface may sense large-scale geometric features: a dynamic mechanism, related to changes in a cell’s tangential stress state, and a static mechanism, related to a cell’s normal stress state. The continuum limits of these models provide evolution equations of tissue stress that help shed new light on the continuum mechanics of biological tissue growth.
