On Thursday Nov. 1st I attended a Math Biology Seminar presented by Chin Ling Guo. It was about a project he's been doing in simulating the self-organization of epithelial tubules.
The most difficult aspect of the presentation was simply that the presenter had a more biological than mathematical background, so while the presentation was not terribly difficult to understand, some of the background explanations of the biology were a little difficult to understand.
The work that the presenter has been doing focuses on using mechanical cell-cell interactions in order to cause epithelial cells to self-organize into long tubules. Up until recently, many scientists have thought that causing this self-organization would require chemical cues, but by allowing cells to associate in the right type of extracellular matrix, mechanical associations allow the cells to self-organize properly.
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