SKM 2023 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 45: Poster: Nonlinear Dynamics, Pattern Formation and Networks

DY 45.12: Poster

Donnerstag, 30. März 2023, 13:00–16:00, P1

How Can Cell-Like Inflated Shells Control Their Shape? —A Stability Analysis — •Paul Nemec and Ulrich Gerland — Physics Department, Technical University of Munich

This work follows a long history of studying how biological organisms arrive at and maintain their shape [1]. Inspired by the question of how E. coli maintain their cylindrical shape during growth [2], we study the growth of pressurised cell-like structures. The model is this: a cell is an inflated elastic shell, where internal and fine grained details are neglected. Growth is the time evolution of the reference or undeformed configuration of the cell, which may depend on geometric and mechanical properties like curvature and stress. Growth must be local and invariant under translations and rotations of the entire cell. Under these constraints, how can cells robustly achieve simple target geometries like a sphere given arbitrarily perturbed initial conditions? This poster presents some initial insights.

[1] Goriely, A. The Mathematics and Mechanics of Biological Growth, Springer (2017).

[2] Amir, A., van Teeffelen, S. Getting into shape: How do rod-like bacteria control their geometry?. Syst Synth Biol 8, 227–235 (2014).