How genetics went to physics to grow living things

The real kind falls this story it came from within Quanisa magazine.
Pin a glass of wine, and you will see the liquid continuously crying on the wet side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, King’s brother Kelvin, explained Philosophical magazine Whether these tears are “tears” or “legs” is caused by the difference in the surface tension between alcohol and water. “This fact provides an explanation for several curious steps,” Thomson wrote. Little by little he realized that the same effect, he later named the Marangoni effect, could look like the umbros he grew up with.
In March, a group of biophysicists in France reported that the impact of Marangoni is responsible for the emergence of a moment of stob that releases cells and develops the axis of the head and tails.
Discovery is part of a trend that protects the norm in biology. Often, biologists try to explain growth, development, and other biological processes as the result of chemicals created by genetic instructions. But that picture is often perfect. Researchers now appreciate the role of mechanical forces in biology: the forces that push and pull tissues to respond to their physical properties, functional growth and development in ways that genes cannot.
Today’s thinking techniques have opened the eyes of scientists to this army by flooding the field with data that defends machine interpretation. “What has changed in the last decades is that it is possible to watch what is happening live, and to see the mechanics in terms of cell movement, cell regeneration,” said Pierre-François Lenne of Aix Marseille University, one of the researchers behind the latest study.
Changes in mechanistic explanations have revived interest in pre-genetic models. For example, in 1917 the Scottish biologist, scholar, and classicist d’arcy thompson published Growing up and in lifewhich flourished the similarity between the shapes found between living things and those from non-living things. Thompson wrote the book as an antidote to what he thought was the excessive tendency to explain everything in terms of Darwinian natural selection. His thesis – that physics, too, shapes it – is back in vogue.
“The hypothesis is that physics and mechanics can help us understand the biology of tissue,” said Alexandre Kabla, a naturalist and engineer at the University of Cambridge.
The task now is to understand the contrast of causes, where genetics and physics somehow use to forget organisms.
Grow with flow
Mechanical models of embryo and tissue growth are not new, but biologists have long been the ones to test these ideas. Just seeing the embryos is difficult; Small and unique, they shine light in all directions like stained glass. But new methods of microscopic analysis and imaging have opened a clear window on the development.
Lenne and his colleagues used other new techniques to detect the movement of cells inside mouse gastruloids: bundles of stem cells that, as they mimic the early stages of embryo development.


