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Join Professor Caterina A. M. La Porta and Professor Stefano Zapperi from the Center for Complexity and Biosystems at the University of Milan for a seminar in biological physics
Phase transitions in cell migration
Phase transitions from a static to a moving phase are observed in a variety of physical systems and play a key role in cellular assemblies such as healthy and cancerous tissue. Dense cellular assemblies, such as epithelial monolayers or cancer cell colonies, share many features with amorphous glassy materials, displaying slow relaxation and intermittent avalanche fluctuations. Cells can collectively flow like a fluid, but at high cell density mutual crowding leads to slowing down and arrest, as a way that is similar undergoing a jamming transition observed in disordered materials such as colloids, granular media or foams.
In this talk, we discuss how a suitable identification of the control and order parameters can shed light on the nature of phase transitions in cell migration. We also clarify the relation between the jamming-unjamming transition and the epithelial-mesenchymal transition, a process by which polarized epithelial cells acquire mesenchymal characteristics and become more motile.
The seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams - join the meeting
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Senior Lecturer in Experimental Biophysics
Professor of Nanochemistry
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