“It was pretty amazing how well the experimental data and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert stated. In reality, it matched so carefully that Carenza’s first response was that it should be mistaken. The staff jokingly frightened {that a} peer reviewer would possibly suppose they’d cheated. “It really was that beautiful,” Carenza stated.

The observations reply a “long-standing question about the type of order present in tissues,” stated Joshua Shaevitz, a physicist at Princeton University who reviewed the paper (and didn’t suppose they’d cheated). Science usually “gets murky,” he stated, when information factors to seemingly conflicting truths—on this case, the nested symmetries. “Then someone points out or shows that, well, those things aren’t so distinct. They’re both right.”

Form, Force, and Function

Accurately defining a liquid crystal’s symmetry isn’t only a mathematical train. Depending on its symmetry, a crystal’s stress tensor—a matrix that captures how a fabric deforms below stress—appears to be like totally different. This tensor is the mathematical hyperlink to the fluid dynamics equations Giomi needed to make use of to attach bodily forces and organic capabilities.

Bringing the physics of liquid crystals to bear on tissues is a brand new technique to perceive the messy, sophisticated world of biology, Hirst stated.

The exact implications of the handoff from hexatic to nematic order aren’t but clear, however the staff suspects that cells could exert a level of management over that transition. There’s even evidence that the emergence of nematic order has one thing to do with cell adhesion, they stated. Figuring out how and why tissues manifest these two interlaced symmetries is a undertaking for the long run—though Giomi is already engaged on utilizing the outcomes to know how most cancers cells stream by the physique once they metastasize. And Shaevitz famous {that a} tissue’s multiscale liquid crystallinity could possibly be associated to embryogenesis—the method by which embryos mould themselves into organisms.

If there’s one central thought in tissue biophysics, Giomi stated, it’s that construction provides rise to forces, and forces give rise to capabilities. In different phrases, controlling multiscale symmetry could possibly be a part of how tissues add as much as greater than the sum of their cells.

There’s “a triangle of form, force, and function,” Giomi stated. “Cells use their shape to regulate forces, and these in turn serve as the running engine of mechanical functionality.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially impartial publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to boost public understanding of science by overlaying analysis developments and traits in arithmetic and the bodily and life sciences.