Abstract

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 mechanically driven flocking or rigidity transitions, or chemically driven reaction-diffusion instabilities. A first key 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. A second question is how are cells mechano-chemically interact in a complex external environment as a function of boundary conditions.  In this talk, I will present a few examples that we have worked on in the context of collective cell migration to start answering these questions.