DIEP seminar by Bernat Corominas Murtra
Clocks are mechanisms that display a (presumed) periodic internal dynamical behaviour enabling us to measure time. Living beings have plenty of mechanisms that metaphorically ressemble the functioning of a clock, like hormone cycles, heart beats or metabolic and cell division rates. These mechanisms define, each, a biological time, being the cell division rate among the most commonly accepted representatives. The observed biological timing is not totally arbitrary: it must display some alignment to physical time due to selective pressures and fundamental constraints coming from physics and chemistry. What is this relation? What are the consequences of this relation with respect to other, apparently distant properties, like the topology or the material properties of the living tissues? In this talk I will revise recent surprising advances in the mapping between biological and physical time in early embryonic development stages of metazoans, for which we demonstrated that it follows a universal hyperbolic law. I will continue showing how one can establish a surprising causal link between time (a)synchronies and the material responses of the embryonic tissues, a mechanism key for the emergence of the complex geometries that will further define the different parts of the organism.
If you wish to attend this seminar online, please send an email to r.lier@uva.nl to receive the zoom-link.