Is the general audience "black board" talk at KITP today, giving an overview of the quantitative approches to morphogenesis program currently unverway.
Symmetry breaking and mechanics.
The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics runs parallel programs and currently there is a biophysics program New Quantitative Approaches to Morphogenesis concurrent with the astrophysics program on A Universe of Black Holes
During each multi-week program there is a black board lunch talk, for all members of KITP, giving an overview of the theme of the program or some key aspect of it. The talk is intended to be for a "general audience", of theoretical physicists with PhDs that is. So usually quite basic overviews.
Today's talks is "The making of an embryo: information and mechanics" by Thomas Lecuit (Developmental Biology Institute of Marseilles - Luminy)
Should be good.
Lots of pretty pictures.
We like pretty pictures.
- cell division is synchronous - ie cell division on opposite side of embryo with no direct contact is concurrent to high precision after several divisions - what is clock or synchronisation mechanism.
Synchronicity breaks when embryo stops being fully symmetric, which must happen for interesting multicellular organisms.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking in biology.
Other issue raised, what is mechanism for actually pinching cell in two - must be internal - that is physics.
Use and abuse of mechanics.
Mitosis
as an interpretive dance, natch
I think this dance is even in real time...
Dr. Moehnke's Genetics class (2009) Baylor University
Interesting history on fundamental experiments in messing with embryos
Cool fruit fly embryo development video from Nature Methods
and another one showing full development speeded up - from EMBL
As usual at KITP all talks are online here - the bio folks have way too many talks, btw
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