Mechanochemical models of tissue dynamics

 

Living tissues are characterized by an intrinsically mechano-chemical interplay of active physical forces and complex biochemical signalling pathways. Either type of feature alone can give rise to complex emergent phenomena at the tissue scale, for example rigidity transitions triggering morphogenesis, or morphogen reaction-diffusion instabilities underlying fate patterning. An important question is thus how to quantitatively assess the contribution of these different cues to the large-scale dynamics of biological materials in cases where multiple phenomena are present or even coupled. In this talk, I will present a few examples we have worked on over the past few years, where mechano-chemical frameworks are key to understand tissue dynamics, in particular during collective cell migration, early embryo morphogenesis and regeneration.