Speaker
Description
Collective cell movements play a critical role in guiding embryonic development, wound repair, and disease progression, such as cancer metastasis. The coordination of these movements is strongly influenced by mechanical forces. Biological tissues can be viewed as soft, out-of-equilibrium systems whose constituent cells continuously generate forces and undergo rearrangements. During development, tissue material
properties can change drastically, reminiscent of rigidity transitions in physics. Measuring the impact of these transitions on cell behaviour, or identifying how to control them, remains experimentally challenging in developing organisms. In this talk, I will present our work developing vertex models in close collaboration with experimentalists, where model predictions and in vivo measurements inform one another iteratively. By integrating experimental measurements into our models and generating testable predictions, we investigate the interplay between tissue material properties, cell-scale forces, and tissue boundary formation across a range of morphogenetic processes.
Together, these efforts yield mechanistic insights with implications for understanding congenital disorders and cancer.
