Biophysicists Uncover Highly effective Symmetries in Dwelling Tissue

“It was fairly wonderful how properly the experimental information and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert mentioned. In truth, it matched so carefully that Carenza’s first response was that it have to be fallacious. The group jokingly nervous {that a} peer reviewer would possibly assume they’d cheated. “It actually was that stunning,” Carenza mentioned.

The observations reply a “long-standing query about the kind of order current in tissues,” mentioned Joshua Shaevitz, a physicist at Princeton College who reviewed the paper (and didn’t assume they’d cheated). Science usually “will get murky,” he mentioned, when information factors to seemingly conflicting truths—on this case, the nested symmetries. “Then somebody factors out or exhibits that, properly, these issues aren’t so distinct. They’re each proper.”

Type, Drive, and Perform

Precisely defining a liquid crystal’s symmetry isn’t only a mathematical train. Relying on its symmetry, a crystal’s stress tensor—a matrix that captures how a fabric deforms below stress—appears completely different. This tensor is the mathematical hyperlink to the fluid dynamics equations Giomi needed to make use of to attach bodily forces and organic features.

Bringing the physics of liquid crystals to bear on tissues is a brand new approach to perceive the messy, difficult world of biology, Hirst mentioned.

The exact implications of the handoff from hexatic to nematic order aren’t but clear, however the group suspects that cells could exert a level of management over that transition. There’s even evidence that the emergence of nematic order has one thing to do with cell adhesion, they mentioned. Determining how and why tissues manifest these two interlaced symmetries is a challenge for the long run—though Giomi is already engaged on utilizing the outcomes to grasp how most cancers cells stream via the physique after they metastasize. And Shaevitz famous {that a} tissue’s multiscale liquid crystallinity could possibly be associated to embryogenesis—the method by which embryos mould themselves into organisms.

If there’s one central thought in tissue biophysics, Giomi mentioned, it’s that construction provides rise to forces, and forces give rise to features. In different phrases, controlling multiscale symmetry could possibly be a part of how tissues add as much as greater than the sum of their cells.

There’s “a triangle of type, power, and performance,” Giomi mentioned. “Cells use their form to manage forces, and these in flip function the operating engine of mechanical performance.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially unbiased publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to boost public understanding of science by protecting analysis developments and developments in arithmetic and the bodily and life sciences.