Présentation
Abstract:
How do animals build, modify, and restore their shape? Shape is an organism-scale property that emerges from distributed molecular and biophysical processes coordinated across time and space, making causality inherently cross-scale. In this talk, I will discuss how morphological identity is achieved and re-established through the integration of biomechanics, behavior, and metabolism. Using cnidarians, whose relatively simple body architecture makes cross-scale causality experimentally tractable, we combine cross-species comparative analysis, genetics, quantitative imaging, and theory to identify the organizing principles of shape control. We show that cnidarian morphogenesis is governed by a small set of conserved mesoscale mechanical modules that generate evolutionary diversity, are dynamically regulated by physiology during life-cycle transitions, and are rescaled during regeneration to restore form from variable initial conditions.
Hosted by Thibaut Brunet