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Instabilities and Fluctuations in Cellular Tissues
Self-renewed cellular tissues can present different degrees of surface structures, which may originate from the stochastic nature of cell-renewal and force-generation processes as well as from inhomogeneities in the pattern of cell renewal. We first characterise the surface fluctuations of a thick cellular tissue with homogeneous but stochastic cell division and cell death, and show that its surface fluctuation spectrum can be mapped onto classical spectra in appropriate asymptotic regimes [1]. In particular, an analogy is drawn with the fluctuation spectra of thermal permeable membranes, here with an activity-mediated effective temperature, as it has been recently observed on the surface-height fluctuations of bacterial biofilms. We also characterise a generic mechanism for the shape instabilities of epithelia and multicellular spheroids that relies on the existence of long-term cellular flows driven by permanent cell renewal [2,3].
This work has been done in collaboration with M. Basan, M. Martin, A. Peilloux, J. Prost.
[1] T. Risler, A. Peilloux, and J. Prost, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 258104 (2015).
[2] T. Risler and M. Basan, New J. Phys. 15, 065011 (2013).
[3] M. Martin and T. Risler, in preparation.