Research and Modelling Seminar: Mathematical modeling in MechanoBiology

On october 26th, from 1.30 pm to 3.30 pm, as part of Research and Modelling Seminar, Dr. Horacio Lopez Menendez from Université Paris Diderot - CNRS - France will give the following seminar:

A multiscale journey from the microscope to the equations

MechanoBiology is an emerging field of science at the interface between
Biology, Mechanics and Soft-Matter Physics. It focuses on the way that
physical forces and changes in cell or tissue mechanics contribute to
development, physiology, and disease. This field is by definition highly
transdisciplinary and demands the interaction of different kinds of
scientific expertise (which is not always an easy task). A major challenge
in the field is the understanding of Mechanotransduction—the molecular
mechanism by which cells sense and respond to mechanical signals—.

The combination of different microfabrication techniques, some of them
developed previously for microelectronics, to create
cellular-microenvironments, allow the study of the role of mechanics in
biology in a well-controlled in-vitro system. These advances represent a
step forward to address the complexity of the living systems providing a
reductionist approach and open new avenues for the Quantitative Biology,
where geometrical and mechanical properties can be partially controlled. The
combination of these techniques provides great conditions for the
development of mathematical modeling and computational simulation in
Mechano-Biology.
In this talk I will describe broadly the involved Biology, some of the
associated physical effects as well as the mathematical model of some open
problems in which I am involved nowadays. These problems spam from
subcellular scale to a tissue scale: (i) The study of the micromechanics of
the cytoskeleton (skeleton of the cell) to contribute to the understanding
of some unexpected properties of living matter. (ii) The cellular extrusion
is a key factor to understand how a tissue regulates their size, removing
cell inducing the cellular apoptosis (cell death). This process is strongly
affected during the tumor formation, growth and metastasis (spreading of
tumor cells). (iii) The epithelial bridges observed in micro-patterns are
suspended cellular monolayers created by skin cells. They could help us to
understand how emerge the mechanic of the skin and how the cells orchestrate
to create complex structures under higher level of stress. By means of
mathematical tools as homogenized continuum Mechano-Chemistry, simplified
scaling arguments, elastomeric liquid-crystals, or numerical simulations as
the finite-elements method, I will describe an approach to contribute to the
interpretations of the experiments of this amazing field of research.

The coordinator
Marco Caliari