Veronica Grieneisen: Mathematical Modelling of Morphodynamics in developing tissues

North West Seminar Series of Mathematical Biology and Data Science

Monday, 23rd June 2021 (hosted by Bakhti Vasiev)

https://www.cms.livjm.ac.uk/APMSeminar/

Abstract:
Over a century ago, D’Arcy Thompson’s published his canonical work “On Growth and Form”, in which a new vision on how to address biological morphogenesis through quantitative principles was presented. It opened the door to mathematicians and physicists to start tackling problems of shape, form and dynamics in biology. I here wish to discuss the legacy of these ideas in a modern context of contemporary imaging and tracking techniques in biology. I will focus on a cell shape misfit mentioned in his book, the plant pavement cell and the developing leaf. I will also discuss how the ideas we extract can be applied to animal epithelia and cancer growth. Through topological quantifications, we are able to infer how cellular decisions regarding divisions are made, and through high-throughput data imaging and analysis these findings can be verified. However, to unravel how ultimately intracellular polarity decisions lead to higher level patterning, we find that the field of morphometrics is still in need of tools and methods that can better capture the developmental complexity. I will present a mathematical quantification technique we developed to fill this gap, coined LOCO-EFA. Together, our results lead to surprising new questions regarding patterning and decisions on cell polarity, division and growth.