Mechanical formalism for tissue dynamics
Résumé
The understanding of morphogenesis in living organisms has been renewed by tremendous progress in experimental techniques that provide access to cell-scale, quantitative information both on the shapes of cells within tissues and on the genes being expressed. This information suggests that our understanding of the respective contributions of gene expression and mechanics, and of their crucial entanglement, will soon leap forward. Biomechanics increasingly benefits from models, which assist the design and interpretation of experiments, point out the main ingredients and assumptions, and can ultimately lead to predictions. The newly accessible local information thus urges for a reflection on how to select suitable classes of mechanical models. We review both mechanical ingredients suggested by the current knowledge of tissue behaviour, and modelling methods that can help generate a constitutive equation. We also recall the mathematical framework developped for continuum materials and how to transform a constitutive equation into a system of partial differential equations amenable to numerical resolution. The present article thus groups together mechanical elements and theoretical methods that are ready to enhance the significance of the data extracted from recent or future high throughput biomechanical experiments.
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Tlili_mech_formalism_tissue_dyn_2013sept_HAL.pdf (980.85 Ko)
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