Symmetry breaking and collective effects in biological physics

Biological cells move, divide, change their shapes, adhere to their neighbors and environments to form tissues and organs. These phenomena are essential for a wide variety of biological processes during morphogenesis for example but their mesoscopic origins are often yet not known. To characterize them, out-of-equilibrium dynamics can be studied with physical experimental designs and associated theories. These topics have triggered new physical formalisms which call for original experimental calibrations and tests associating tightly quantitative biology with the design of new setups and models for living matter. I will illustrate these experiments of biological physics with two examples of spontaneous rotation of cells in 2D and in 3D [1,2]. These phenomena show that basic principles in physics can be used and challenged to unravel new cellular mechanisms with physiological relevance.

References:

1- S. Lo Vecchio et al. Nature Physics 20:322–331(2024). 

2- L. Lu et al. Nature Physics 20:1194–1203 (2024)