In this talk, I will first survey various biological systems where concepts around fluidity or fluidization play critical roles in their deformation and flow, with an emphasis on Maxwell-type fluidization and its parallel formulations. Then, I will talk about our work on tip-growth morphogenesis in plant cells, where cell-wall fluidity results from wall elasticity and remodeling in response to elastic strain, and its connection to wall surface geometry in stably growing regimes. We will also discuss our current work in which we consider wall-thickness dynamics, resulting in oscillatory growth regimes with various morphologies.
Last, I will talk about how fluidization might affect growth-induced morphogenesis using the theory of fluidized growth elasticity, focusing on the initial development of shape-symmetry breaking from a flat growing strip. Our analysis reveals a different picture of growth-induced morphogenesis: rather than emerging at a critical stress, symmetry breaking develops continuously during growth. Fluidity regulates stress evolution, the rate of shape-symmetry breaking, and flow patterns, establishing it as an active regulator of morphogenesis beyond its intuitive role in stress relaxation. We will discuss its current application and extension to morphogenesis involving tissue free boundaries arising from experiments, such as wound closure in confluent cell monolayers at both the cell and tissue levels.
Min Wu is an Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Irvine, and subsequently held research and teaching positions at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Northwestern University before joining WPI in 2017. Her research has focused on theoretical modeling of growth and morphogenesis in biological systems, using approaches from finite elasticity, mechanics and thermodynamics of continua, and computational modeling in conjunction with experimental data. She was awarded an NSF CAREER grant for studying tip-growth morphogenesis and an NIH R01 grant for the multiscale understanding of fluidity in growing tissues.