Emergence of a Hexagonal Lattice of Differentiated Cells by Tissue-Scale Mechanics
- Speaker
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Richard Carthew, Ph.D.Owen L. Coon Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
The 2024 lecture series in biology is “Dynamics of Life”; Motion, change and interaction are constants of biology. They are ubiquitous, linking life’s various scales from fluid flows inside cells to the flocking patterns of birds. In these lectures, scientists will discuss their exploration of the dynamical mechanisms at the core of biological phenomena through the lenses of theory, simulation and observation.
2024 Lecture Series Themes
Mathematics and Computer Science: Machine Learning in the Natural Sciences
Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite those interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Pattern formation of biological structures involves the arrangement of different types of cells in an ordered spatial configuration.
In this Presidential Lecture, Richard Carthew will describe his team’s work investigating the mechanism of patterning the Drosophila (fruit fly) compound eye into a precise hexagonal lattice of photoreceptor clusters called ommatidia. Previous studies led to a long-standing biochemical model whereby a reaction-diffusion process is templated by recently formed ommatidia to propagate a molecular prepattern across the eye tissue. Instead, we find that the templating mechanism is mechano-chemical; newly born columns of ommatidia serve as a template to spatially pattern cell flows that move the cells in the tissue into position to form each new column of ommatidia. Thus, the self-organization of a regular pattern of cell fates in an epithelium is mechanically driven.
About the Speaker
Carthew is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern University. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, he received a Ph.D. in biology from MIT. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California, Berkeley, he held a faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Northwestern University in 2001. He is the inaugural director of the NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, established in 2023 in Chicago. His primary research focuses on the patterns of shape and form in complex animals. He was also a pioneer in elucidating the mechanisms whereby small RNA molecules can regulate gene expression across the eukaryota (nucleus-bearing cellular life). Carthew is a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow and a Pew Biomedical Scholar.