Upside Down and Inside Out: The Biomechanics of Cell Sheet Folding

par Prof. Raymond E. GOLDSTEIN (University of Cambridge & IHES)

jeudi 30 mars 2017, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Paris

Amphithéâtre Léon Motchane (IHES)

Deformations of cell sheets are ubiquitous in early animal development, often arising from a complex and poorly understood interplay of cell shape changes, division, and migration. In this talk I will describe an approach to understanding such problems based on perhaps the simplest example of cell sheet folding: the “inversion” process of the algal genus Volvox, during which spherical embryos literally turn themselves inside out through a process hypothesized to arise from cell shape changes alone.  Through a combination of light sheet microscopy and elasticity theory a quantitative understanding of this process is now emerging.