In the last 3 decades, physicists have been massively joining the effort to find physical models to describe biological phenomena. This recent awakening of “biological physics” is the result of several factors, but it is possible to identify 3 fundamental pillars: the work of Vicsek 1995, who founded the field of active matter; the understanding that physical models of foams and viscoelasticity can be used to describe cellular tissues; and the enormous amount of biochemical and biomechanical data produced daily due to advances in computational and experimental techniques. These first 30 years of biological physics provided us with many interesting models capable of explaining many behaviors, such as collective movement patterns in birds, stress fields in embryonic tissues, and much more. However, most of them have the limitation of only qualitatively reproducing biological phenomena without necessarily being able to predict them quantitatively. To address this issue, we are now asking some critical questions: Can these models really be used to predict biological behavior? Or are biological physics models limited to this qualitative role? The current answers to these questions are unknown, but trying to answer them will certainly involve a huge effort by many researchers from different areas of science. In the face of all this, one last question can be asked: is all this effort really worth it? This August 3rd, I invite you all to join me at the seminar and dive into these questions. In the presentation I will discuss the physical aspects of collective movement, mechanical properties in epithelial tissues, and the "pitfalls" of modeling with many parameters, using experimental data from epithelial tissues in vivo and in vitro as examples.

 

*Seminar Language: English