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SUMMARY:How constraints and chirality guide self-organisation in living sy
 stems - Alexander Mietke (University of Oxford\, Department of Physics)
DTSTART:20231031T130000Z
DTEND:20231031T140000Z
UID:TALK206521@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Sarah Loos
DESCRIPTION:Living matter has the fascinating ability to autonomously orga
 nise itself in space and time. Self-organisation refers typically to the f
 act that local interactions among some “microscopic” units enable an e
 merging dynamic that is seemingly coordinated on “macroscopic” length 
 scales much larger than these units. Classical examples are the interactio
 ns of actin and actin-binding molecules within the eukaryotic cell cortex\
 , of cells within tissues or of entire organisms interacting within popula
 tions. While details of each self-organisation phenomenon will depend on t
 he concrete system\, mechanistic insights can still be developed by identi
 fying generic features that are shared among systems – an abstraction th
 at physics approaches provide many useful tools for. Two such generic feat
 ures this talk focuses on are mechanical constraints and broken chiral sym
 metry\, which are both ubiquitous in biological systems. Specifically\, we
  will discuss the impact of mechanical constraints in guiding tissue morph
 ogenesis in the flour beetle\, the role of chirality in guiding the emerge
 nt properties of living crystals made of starfish embryos\, as well as a m
 echanism to robustly establish a left-right body axis during nematode deve
 lopment when both\, mechanical constraints and chirality\, act in concert.
LOCATION:Center for Mathematical Sciences\, Lecture room MR4
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