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ACTIVE NEMATICS

Living proof of effective defects

Nature Physics volume 17, pages 172–173 (2021)Cite this article

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A class of biological matter including elongated cells and filaments can be understood in the framework of active nematic liquid crystals. Within these systems, topological defects emerge and give rise to remarkable collective behaviours.

Multidisciplinary research often resembles the parable of the blind men and the elephant: there’s a lot of stumbling in the dark, trying to distinguish a tusk from a tail. When the blind men are biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers, each person brings a different perspective on the elephant in the room, which may be a single cell, an organism or even a population. It’s impractical to expect everyone to speak the same scientific language, so instead one must identify and translate the most important concepts. By interpreting the ideas of non-equilibrium physics in terms of the active properties of a biological system, physicists have shown that these properties lead to the emergence of non-intuitive collective behaviours that play key roles in cell shape changes, cell migration and invasion1. Now, writing in Nature Physics, three different studies demonstrate that a similar physical framework based on active nematics can be used to understand diverse biological systems — from the way that actin fibres are organized during morphogenesis2 to the collective dynamics of bacteria3,4.

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Fig. 1: Topological defects in living systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Jacques Monod, Université de Paris, CNRS, Paris, France

    M.-A. Fardin & B. Ladoux

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  1. M.-A. Fardin
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  2. B. Ladoux
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Correspondence to B. Ladoux.

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Fardin, MA., Ladoux, B. Living proof of effective defects. Nat. Phys. 17, 172–173 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-01084-0

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