Edouard Hannezo “Active matter models of collective cell migration”

Living tissues are characterized by an intrinsically mechano-chemical interplay of active physical forces and complex biochemical signalling pathways. Either type of feature alone can give rise to complex emergent phenomena at the tissue scale, for example mechanically driven flocking or rigidity transitions, or chemically driven reaction-diffusion instabilities. An important question is thus how to quantitatively assess the contribution of these different cues to the large-scale dynamics of biological materials in cases where multiple phenomena are present or even coupled. In this talk, I will present a few examples that we have worked on in the context of collective cell migration.