BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 5: Active Biological Matter II (joint session BP/CPP/DY)
BP 5.2: Talk
Monday, March 22, 2021, 11:20–11:40, BPb
Developmentally driven self-assembly of living chiral crystals — •Alexander Mietke1, Tzer Han Tan2, Hugh Higinbotham2, Yuchao Chen2, Peter Foster2, Shreyas Gokhale2, Jörn Dunkel1, and Nikta Fakhri2 — 1Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA — 2Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
The emergent dynamics exhibited by self-organizing collections of living organisms often shows signatures of symmetries that are broken at the single-organism level. At the same time, early organism development itself is accompanied by a sequence of symmetry breaking events that eventually establish the body plan. Combining these key aspects of collective phenomena and embryonic development, we describe here the spontaneous formation of hydrodynamically stabilized active crystals made of hundreds of starfish embryos during early development. As development progresses and embryos change morphology, crystals become increasingly disordered and eventually stop forming. We show that these structures exhibit distinct macroscopic chiral features as a direct consequence of the embryo's chiral swimming properties. We introduce a hydrodynamic near-field model that quantitatively describes the formation and rotation of crystals, as well as the emergence of long-lived chiral deformation waves, all of which can be understood as consequences of broken symmetries on the single-embryo level.