CCB Colloquium: M. Lisa Manning

Title: The surprising impact of studying biological tissues as living materials

Abstract: Your body is amazing. The instructions for its construction are encoded in only two cells, yet trillions of cells have ended up in more or less the right place. So what governs the motion of cells inside a living organism, and what goes wrong in disease? Some of these questions can be answered by thinking of tissues in your body as a “living material”. A tissue’s global material properties – whether it is a fluid or a solid, or whether it has surface tension – are key for its biological function. Therefore, an important open question is how single cells might control these global properties. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress from my group and others in developing a theoretical and computational framework for predicting the emergent collective behavior of dense groups of cells and biopolymer networks. I will explain how these ideas are having an impact in diverse areas of biology, from cancer tumorigenesis to wound healing, asthma, and congenital disease, and discuss future prospects for this newly emerging area that combines mechanobiology and tissue mechanics with statistical mechanics and active matter.