Séminaire

Lundi 6 Octobre 2025 à 15h15.

Bridging the scales in biological tissues

Nicolas CUNY
(Université de Genève)

Salle Fontannes, Dawin D

Invité(e) par
Olivier COCHET-ESCARTIN

présentera en 1 heure :

''Résumé / Abstract :
Biological tissues are active materials exhibiting complex behaviour at the macroscopic scale, allowing them to fulfill diverse biological functions. However, the biochemical processes responsible for those original behaviours take place at much smaller scales, typically at the (sub)cellular level. This scale separation makes it challenging to understand those tissues’ mechanobiology, i.e the reciprocal interactions between biology and mechanics.
In this talk, I will introduce active gel theory, a framework developped in the last two decades to describe tissues at an intermediate mesoscopic scale as a continuous medium and to implement an effective description of the biochemical processes at this scale. I will first illustrate the interest of such a description by showing how an active shell model made it possible to unveil biomechanical determinants of the larval shape in different species of cnidarians. In a second time, I will explain how this framework can be used to link the dynamics of a tube of endothelial cells under pressure to the behaviour of subcellular biological components like actin.
Finally, I will explain how, using tools from statistical physics, one can derive a mesoscopic continuous model for an assembly of elastic beads immersed in a newtonian fluid and try to give some perspectives on the way such an approach could be adapted to derive active gel models with more biological content.
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