GTIIT Physics Seminar

Title: Symmetry breaking and collective effects in biological physics

Speaker: Dr. Daniel Riveline

French National Centre for Scientific Research, France

Abstract

Biological cells move, divide, change their shapes, adhere to their neighbors and environments to form tissues and organs. These phenomena are essential for a wide variety of biological processes during morphogenesis for example but their mesoscopic origins are often yet not clarified. To characterize them, out-of-equilibrium dynamics can be studied with physical experimental designs and associated theories. These topics have triggered new physical formalisms which call for original experimental calibrations and tests associating tightly quantitative biology with the design of new setups and models for living matter. I will illustrate these experiments of biological physics with the following examples: spontaneous breaking of symmetry for single-cell motion, collective effects in elongation of epithelial colonies, spontaneous rotations in 2D and in 3D. These phenomena will show that basic principles in physics can be used and challenged to unravel new cellular mechanisms with physiological relevance.

Biography

Dr. Riveline is an experimental biophysicist who probes self-organisation phenomena in living matter using physics and quantitative biology. Dr. Riveline is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and group leader at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) of the University of Strasbourg. After receiving his PhD in physics in 1997 from the Institut Curie in Paris (France), Daniel Riveline took up a post-doctoral position in biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). In 1999, he started his group at the University of Grenoble (France) where he established mechanosensing of contacts with the extracellular matrix and between cells. In 2010, after a sabbatical in biology at Rockefeller University (United States) where he managed to inject fission yeast for the first time and to characterize cytokinesis ring closure, he relocated to the University of Strasbourg to establish a group in cell physics at the Institute of Supramolecular Science and Engineering (ISIS). He then moved to IGBMC in 2015, where he continues his research activities on self-organisation in living matter.