Understanding How Biological Cells Self-Organize Into Organs and Organisms

Explore groundbreaking research on collective cell behavior and tissue formation in this Presidential Lecture from the Simons Foundation. Delve into how multicellular organisms achieve programmed collective motion to form tissues and organs, and understand how this programming can malfunction in diseases like cancer. Learn about experimental findings showing how organisms control cell motion through tissue mechanical properties, particularly across fluid-solid transitions. Examine universal features emerging from predictive models of collective cell behavior, drawing parallels between tissue rigidity and mechanical metamaterials like origami, while distinguishing them from conventional materials. Discover both 'bottom-up' approaches that reveal how molecular-scale rules lead to complex emergent behavior, and 'top-down' approaches utilizing new physical learning paradigms to optimize collective tissue response through cell-scale property tuning.