“It was fairly superb how effectively the experimental knowledge and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert mentioned. Actually, it matched so intently that Carenza’s first response was that it should be mistaken. The crew jokingly apprehensive {that a} peer reviewer may assume they’d cheated. “It actually was that lovely,” 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 typically “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 cloth deforms underneath stress—appears 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 capabilities.
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 undertaking for the long run—though Giomi is already engaged on utilizing the outcomes to grasp how most cancers cells circulate by way of the physique once they metastasize. And Shaevitz famous {that a} tissue’s multiscale liquid crystallinity might 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 offers rise to forces, and forces give rise to capabilities. In different phrases, controlling multiscale symmetry might be a part of how tissues add as much as greater than the sum of their cells.
There’s “a triangle of type, drive, and performance,” Giomi mentioned. “Cells use their form to control forces, and these in flip function the operating engine of mechanical performance.”
Authentic story reprinted with permission from Quanta Journal, an editorially impartial publication of the Simons Basis whose mission is to boost public understanding of science by masking analysis developments and tendencies in arithmetic and the bodily and life sciences.
