APS March meeting abstract deadline is coming up - October 25! Submit to the Morphogenesis category 04.01.11 - Invited talks will be by Emily Gehrels @EmilyGehrels and Anna Erzberger @ErzbergerGroup

For physicists, we also show that there's a big difference between "jammed" and "unjammed" tissues. We find unjamming is necessary - but not sufficient - to predict the ability of cells to dissociate from an invading front.

What controls whether cells - or clusters of cells - break off from an invading cancerous front? New preprint from my group in collaboration with the Konstantopoulos group @KKLabJHU , led by @wwang721 doi.org/10.1101/2024.06.28.6…

Our work on how cells deposit, sense, and interact with their footprints is now published in PNAS - how cells can develop oscillations, spiral out, or yet more complex dynamics! Work by Emiliano Perez Ipina (on the market!), data from @BLadoux group: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2318248…

Our work on how a cell can best sense a dynamically-changing chemical signal - and what sort of environments can lead to a rapidly-changing signal - is now out in Biophys. J: authors.elsevier.com/a/1i%7E… .

Here's the same model, same parameters as the first one - but with a smaller cell. In this case, we find F(x,v) and find that the dynamics are bistable. Essentially, it's harder for the small cell to "find" the bridge to travel over it.

But MCF10A is "bistable" - if you evolve under the equation of motion dv/dt = F(x,v), you end up in one basin or the other.

They found that if you use F(x,v) to construct "streamlines" of the MDA-MB-231 cancerous cells - basically tracing out what happens to a particle with dv/dt = F(x,v) - you get a limit cycle - you'd predict that the cell oscillates back and forth no matter where it starts.

We started here by looking at work by @d_brueckner et al. nature.com/articles/s41567-0… - they construct the average acceleration F(x,v) conditional on the position, velocity of the cell directly from data. This is the "equation of motion" of the cell!

If you put a cancerous (MDA-MB-231) cell on a pattern of two "basins" connected by a narrow bridge, it hops back and forth like this: why? What is different between it and healthy MCF 10A, which does something slightly different? New preprint from Pedrom Zadeh + me answers this!

Elongated cells often line up perpendicular to an electric field. Why? Is there a benefit? We think about how sensing an electric field interacts with cell-cell alignment and nematic order in a new preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2404.04723

Two more talks I didn't fit into the first snapshot, and the link: meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR…

Also at #APSMarchMeeting - check out the Physical Biology of Guided Migration session on Monday - the idea here is to think about physical factors in migration throughout biology. Emiliano Perez Ipina has put together a really nice session!

Folks at #APSMarchMeeting - my group has nine (yikes!) talks this year. Keep an eye out if you're interested in how cells sense and interact with their environment and other cells! (Also some membranes and soft matter in there!)

What a physicist sees when you start talking about signal transduction: