Grand Séminaire d'Institut

Vendredi 1^er Juin 2018 à 11h00.

Liquid, glassy and flocking states in epithelial monolayers

''Cells in a collective exhibit properties that may differ dramatically from those of the same cells in isolation. Controlled experiments performed with epithelial monolayers and simulations have shown that simple biophysical ingredients seem to capture several relevant features of the observed collective phenotype. However, how far these analogies between complex biological systems and their simpler physical counterparts can be brought is not yet clear. To gain some insight into these issues, we have studied epithelial monolayers in different conditions of confluency. Depending on the experimental conditions, our monolayers exhibit features that are typical of liquid, amorphous solid or flocking states. We study these states with a combination of real and reciprocal space imaging techniques, while we simulate their behavior with a combination of self-propelled Voronoi and agent-based particle models. In this talk, I will give an overview of these results by focusing in particular on the description of flocking liquid states obtained by chemically-induced over-expression of a small GTPase in otherwise quiescent monolayers and on the connection between structure and dynamics in amorphous solid monolayers.''