“It was fairly superb how effectively the experimental knowledge and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert mentioned. In actual fact, it matched so carefully that Carenza’s first response was that it should be mistaken. The crew jokingly nervous {that a} peer reviewer would possibly assume they’d cheated. “It actually was that stunning,” Carenza mentioned.
The observations reply a “long-standing query about the kind of order current in tissues,” mentioned Joshua Shaevitz, a physicist at Princeton College who reviewed the paper (and didn’t assume they’d cheated). Science usually “will get murky,” he mentioned, when knowledge factors to seemingly conflicting truths—on this case, the nested symmetries. “Then somebody factors out or reveals that, effectively, these issues aren’t so distinct. They’re each proper.”
Type, Pressure, and Perform
Precisely defining a liquid crystal’s symmetry isn’t only a mathematical train. Relying on its symmetry, a crystal’s stress tensor—a matrix that captures how a fabric deforms underneath stress—appears to be like totally different. This tensor is the mathematical hyperlink to the fluid dynamics equations Giomi wished to make use of to attach bodily forces and organic features.
Bringing the physics of liquid crystals to bear on tissues is a brand new option to perceive the messy, sophisticated world of biology, Hirst mentioned.
The exact implications of the handoff from hexatic to nematic order aren’t but clear, however the crew suspects that cells could exert a level of management over that transition. There’s even proof that the emergence of nematic order has one thing to do with cell adhesion, they mentioned. Determining how and why tissues manifest these two interlaced symmetries is a venture for the long run—though Giomi is already engaged on utilizing the outcomes to know how most cancers cells move by the physique after they metastasize. And Shaevitz famous {that a} tissue’s multiscale liquid crystallinity could possibly be associated to embryogenesis—the method by which embryos mildew themselves into organisms.
If there’s one central concept in tissue biophysics, Giomi mentioned, it’s that construction provides rise to forces, and forces give rise to features. In different phrases, controlling multiscale symmetry could possibly be a part of how tissues add as much as greater than the sum of their cells.
There’s “a triangle of type, power, and performance,” Giomi mentioned. “Cells use their form to manage forces, and these in flip function the working engine of mechanical performance.”
Unique story reprinted with permission from Quanta Journal, an editorially unbiased publication of the Simons Basis whose mission is to reinforce public understanding of science by protecting analysis developments and traits in arithmetic and the bodily and life sciences.
