1 00:00:00,880 --> 00:00:05,310 So I have to. 2 00:00:11,420 --> 00:00:17,480 So good morning everyone. Thank you very much for coming. It's really nice to see such a turnout of people here. 3 00:00:17,780 --> 00:00:22,040 We've got good weather and we've carefully organised it. So it's eights weekend. 4 00:00:22,070 --> 00:00:29,660 So if anybody wants to go down to the river this afternoon, it's a great place to watch the boats, to eat ice cream, 5 00:00:29,660 --> 00:00:38,750 to drink Pimm's and to play chicken with the bikes as the students try and go up and down this crowded towpath and keep up with the boats. 6 00:00:39,680 --> 00:00:44,450 But of course, before we can play like this, before, like the students, we have to have to do some work. 7 00:00:44,870 --> 00:00:50,600 And the work we're doing this morning is it's thinking about biological physics. 8 00:00:51,540 --> 00:01:00,719 People have been doing really super biological physics and McLarens and doing experimental work for a very long time here and in particular, 9 00:01:00,720 --> 00:01:05,850 they've tended to concentrate on imaging very small things inside cells. 10 00:01:06,970 --> 00:01:14,860 Biological physics in in the first century is a bit newer, and I think it comes from, 11 00:01:14,860 --> 00:01:21,760 at least in my case, um, it's coming from an interest in statistical physics. 12 00:01:22,480 --> 00:01:28,540 Um, from statistical physics. I started working on something called active matter and not just me. 13 00:01:28,540 --> 00:01:31,810 Many people around the world now are working on active matter, 14 00:01:32,200 --> 00:01:37,930 and then we sort of realise that active matter really is pretty much the same thing as biology. 15 00:01:38,260 --> 00:01:42,610 And we might have something to say about biological physics. 16 00:01:45,100 --> 00:01:51,070 So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by trying to explain to you what active matter is. 17 00:01:51,430 --> 00:01:56,650 And then I'm going to talk about a particular question in mechanical biology. 18 00:01:57,400 --> 00:02:03,580 How does cells move. Now if you think about it without thinking too hard, you know they don't look like they move at all. 19 00:02:03,610 --> 00:02:10,180 Bits of us are not wandering over. You know, we're not a science fiction movie, so bits of us are not taking off and wandering somewhere. 20 00:02:10,570 --> 00:02:16,840 But in fact, we'll see this morning that cells do move, sometimes slowly, sometimes a bit faster. 21 00:02:17,770 --> 00:02:23,440 And our first talk about how single cells move not I'll talk about how a layer of cells, 22 00:02:23,440 --> 00:02:27,700 a sort of experimental model system of a layer of cells on the surface, 23 00:02:27,700 --> 00:02:36,280 move and then talk about whether and how this might be relevant to what's going on to real problems in vivo. 24 00:02:37,180 --> 00:02:40,210 I'm very much by about halfway through this talk. 25 00:02:40,420 --> 00:02:45,040 We're at a level where we're doing very research when we don't understand what's going on. 26 00:02:45,070 --> 00:02:50,290 So if I give the same talk in five years or so, things might be very different. 27 00:02:50,860 --> 00:03:02,200 And it's still very much the jury's out how much physicists can sensibly say about biology in this approach using statistical physics. 28 00:03:05,170 --> 00:03:10,470 So we all remember. Don't worry about equilibrium statistical physics. 29 00:03:10,480 --> 00:03:16,030 The gas in this room is going to come to equilibrium, and it's going to more or less sit there, 30 00:03:16,030 --> 00:03:23,530 more or less constant density described by the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution with very small fluctuations. 31 00:03:24,980 --> 00:03:30,320 But sometimes, if the interactions between particles are a bit different, they can get. 32 00:03:30,560 --> 00:03:34,340 Things can happen in a much more interesting way. 33 00:03:35,630 --> 00:03:37,760 This is a very simple model system. 34 00:03:38,390 --> 00:03:46,820 The particles are moving with some sort of velocity, and they have a small interaction so that they tend to align with each other. 35 00:03:47,450 --> 00:03:50,630 And then a bit of noise random fluctuations. 36 00:03:50,810 --> 00:03:54,080 So they tend to um, align with each other as well. 37 00:03:54,890 --> 00:04:01,310 And you can get very complex structures just from this simple model. 38 00:04:03,310 --> 00:04:12,150 I'm sure it reminds you of this. It's one of the nice things about this particular bit of the talk is you can show people in nice movies. 39 00:04:12,990 --> 00:04:18,060 Uh, so these, uh, uh, birds possibly over war, possibly not over or. 40 00:04:18,440 --> 00:04:22,440 Um, nobody really knows why starlings form patterns like this. 41 00:04:23,310 --> 00:04:26,610 It's quite hard to do physics for starlings because they can. 42 00:04:27,360 --> 00:04:30,930 Well, it's really hard to image them in three dimensions up in the air. 43 00:04:31,020 --> 00:04:36,660 But also they you have to worry about free will, you know, are they actually looking at each other and trying to line up. 44 00:04:37,500 --> 00:04:43,380 Uh, but you can get nice patterns in things where things should start to be simpler. 45 00:04:43,770 --> 00:04:49,920 For example, this is a suspension of bacteria of E.coli. 46 00:04:50,610 --> 00:04:54,870 So lots of E.coli sitting in a layer on a surface. 47 00:04:56,130 --> 00:04:59,670 And again, you're getting patterns. You're getting complicated patterns. 48 00:05:00,770 --> 00:05:08,620 This looks like turbulence. Things are not meant to be turbulent at these sorts of length scales. 49 00:05:09,100 --> 00:05:12,460 Turbulence is usually things like waterfalls. 50 00:05:13,430 --> 00:05:16,790 The atmosphere. Large length scales here. 51 00:05:16,790 --> 00:05:21,169 These things are tiny, and yet we're still getting a turbulent like state. 52 00:05:21,170 --> 00:05:25,850 We're getting sort of patterns, and these ones are actually called active turbulence. 53 00:05:26,240 --> 00:05:32,930 To distinguish it from this high Reynolds number, these large length scales of turbulence. 54 00:05:35,910 --> 00:05:39,390 So these are examples of active matter. 55 00:05:40,410 --> 00:05:43,830 Active matter exists on all length scales. 56 00:05:44,060 --> 00:05:53,370 Yes. And pictures of some examples. For example nature proteins tiny proteins that move things around in cells. 57 00:05:54,490 --> 00:06:01,390 Bacteria and, uh, eukaryotic cells, the squishy cells that move around. 58 00:06:02,840 --> 00:06:09,350 All the way up to things like the starlings and things like us. 59 00:06:10,410 --> 00:06:16,890 And also these things here which are called active colloids. 60 00:06:17,610 --> 00:06:21,840 And what's special about these systems? What makes them active? 61 00:06:22,750 --> 00:06:31,060 Is it that taking energy from the surroundings and then using it to do things usually move around that taking energy? 62 00:06:31,330 --> 00:06:36,310 Each one of them is taking energy from the surroundings and using it to do work. 63 00:06:37,880 --> 00:06:46,400 It's a bit different from driven systems. For example, if, um, you push a fluid, it all moves in the same direction. 64 00:06:46,580 --> 00:06:51,260 These things are acting individually. They're taking in energy individually. 65 00:06:52,330 --> 00:06:57,330 Let's look at these particular ones. This is a nice example of what's called active colloids. 66 00:06:57,340 --> 00:07:03,040 And I've got a movie showing you an experiment on active colloids. 67 00:07:04,390 --> 00:07:08,260 Colloids are tiny particles, micron size particles. 68 00:07:09,040 --> 00:07:12,939 And these things have a bit of something called haematite stuck to them. 69 00:07:12,940 --> 00:07:21,070 Blue thing and that slide and that puts in a suspension a solution with hydrogen peroxide in. 70 00:07:21,670 --> 00:07:25,090 And the point is that if you shine light on these things, 71 00:07:25,450 --> 00:07:32,050 the hydrogen peroxide and the haematite reacts with each other and it turns into a tiny rocket. 72 00:07:32,500 --> 00:07:36,550 So these things move in a certain direction. 73 00:07:37,460 --> 00:07:41,300 So let's have a look. See what happens when you turn on the light. 74 00:07:43,520 --> 00:07:49,009 And what you can see is that they start hitting each other and forming a pattern. 75 00:07:49,010 --> 00:07:52,670 They start forming rafts of the active particles. 76 00:07:54,160 --> 00:07:57,910 And then in a minute, the lights will be turned off again. 77 00:07:59,300 --> 00:08:09,620 And the patterns, um, go away. And these things act pretty much like molecules doing random Brownian motion moving around at random. 78 00:08:09,620 --> 00:08:18,500 They will all spread out. As you turn the light off and it's because you're drunk, you're putting energy into the system. 79 00:08:18,710 --> 00:08:22,010 You can end up with these non-equilibrium patterns. 80 00:08:24,200 --> 00:08:32,329 This is a very clever experiment. It's hard to make these things so tiny, but what it does is, is nothing like the starlings. 81 00:08:32,330 --> 00:08:35,570 It's still a very simple set up. 82 00:08:35,780 --> 00:08:46,549 The ordering you get is still rather simple. But if you look at these other examples of active matter, you see that one's a bit special. 83 00:08:46,550 --> 00:08:49,700 That's us trying to do it ourselves, fabricating something. 84 00:08:49,970 --> 00:08:56,240 These other ones are nature doing it. These are natural biological systems. 85 00:08:57,580 --> 00:09:01,389 And that's really what biology is, right? Cells and things like that too. 86 00:09:01,390 --> 00:09:06,670 Taking energy from the surroundings. We are eating food and using it to do work. 87 00:09:08,330 --> 00:09:12,350 So people have realised it actually is quite hard to make active matter systems. 88 00:09:12,350 --> 00:09:17,209 But never mind, we've got this playground out their playground out there, 89 00:09:17,210 --> 00:09:25,610 which is biology, and that's great because we can test our theories on biological systems. 90 00:09:26,360 --> 00:09:34,430 And even better, maybe we can say something about the biological systems from this point of view of active matter. 91 00:09:36,860 --> 00:09:42,410 We weren't. We? The community wasn't the first to think about this. 92 00:09:43,540 --> 00:09:50,470 Long time ago, Schrodinger wrote a book which is called um, What is Life? 93 00:09:50,950 --> 00:09:56,380 And in this book he said, living matter evades the decay to equilibrium. 94 00:09:58,070 --> 00:10:02,680 And you think about it, that's actually quite a nice way of thinking in a physical way. 95 00:10:02,680 --> 00:10:05,890 What it's like, what it means to be alive. 96 00:10:06,670 --> 00:10:12,700 Okay. Because if you're out of equilibrium, you have energy, you can do things. 97 00:10:13,480 --> 00:10:19,420 And if you come to equilibrium, it's pretty sad and it's just a bad thing. 98 00:10:22,870 --> 00:10:29,440 So. What we're really doing is non-equilibrium statistical physics. 99 00:10:29,740 --> 00:10:41,390 How do you. Do the physics of systems which are meant to be out of equilibrium, which exist in a non-equilibrium state. 100 00:10:42,080 --> 00:10:47,540 Not systems which are driven like pushing water or something falling under gravity, 101 00:10:47,840 --> 00:10:54,440 but systems which themselves are taking energy from their surroundings and using it to do work. 102 00:10:58,370 --> 00:11:06,470 So let's concentrate on cells and in particular the sort of squishy cells, um, and ask how do they move? 103 00:11:07,750 --> 00:11:15,950 So. Certainly I came from a background where biology was a something you didn't do if you could do physics. 104 00:11:18,050 --> 00:11:24,170 And b nobody knew much about it in those days. I mean, to me, when I learned about cells, it looked like this. 105 00:11:24,560 --> 00:11:31,940 Okay, there was a nucleus in the middle and some sort of cytoplasm around the outside, and it moved. 106 00:11:31,940 --> 00:11:35,479 But we never really thought about asking how or why. 107 00:11:35,480 --> 00:11:40,370 Or I think it sort of stuck out feelers and grabbed onto the surface, which actually more or less does. 108 00:11:40,730 --> 00:11:43,670 Um, yeah, but we've got better with that. 109 00:11:43,880 --> 00:11:55,280 I mean, thanks to many, many, uh, people who worked on what is now amazing imaging, we have some sort of idea about how individual cells move. 110 00:11:56,980 --> 00:12:00,190 Okay. So this is a typical sort of cell in the body. 111 00:12:01,680 --> 00:12:11,760 You do have a nucleus which is blue here. You have cytoplasm around the nucleus, which in a sort of gloopy way can change shape. 112 00:12:12,390 --> 00:12:18,570 And the way it changes shape is due to these green things which are acting filaments. 113 00:12:18,570 --> 00:12:22,140 So they're basically long, thin molecules. 114 00:12:22,920 --> 00:12:27,690 And these molecules due to clever chemistry can treadmill. 115 00:12:28,350 --> 00:12:36,209 What happens is that little bits of actin are added to the front of the molecule and then taken away from the back of the molecule. 116 00:12:36,210 --> 00:12:46,590 So these things move forward and push the cytoplasm in the direction that this thing decides it wants to go, often to follow a chemical signal. 117 00:12:48,200 --> 00:12:53,890 And then somehow it has to move forward by. Although it's pushing forward, it has to move itself forward. 118 00:12:53,900 --> 00:12:57,680 It does this by putting down focal adhesions to the surface. 119 00:12:58,760 --> 00:13:05,120 So complicated biological molecules will hang on to the surface and then pull it forwards. 120 00:13:06,780 --> 00:13:10,050 That was all it would do. It would just get very long and thin. 121 00:13:10,770 --> 00:13:13,620 And so you need some way of its pulling in its tail. 122 00:13:14,190 --> 00:13:20,730 And it does that in a passive way by having surface tension like a drop, and also in an active way, 123 00:13:21,060 --> 00:13:30,150 by having molecular motors, motor proteins, which walk around on the filaments here and tend to contract them. 124 00:13:30,190 --> 00:13:36,150 So it's like a network being contracted by these motors and pulling the tail. 125 00:13:36,630 --> 00:13:46,790 So it's going pull, pull, pull. Now, a physics model of this is actually very easy and actually works rather well. 126 00:13:47,630 --> 00:13:52,340 Physics models says right. I've got a polar force pulling this along. 127 00:13:52,340 --> 00:13:55,880 That's the fight. Pulling on, pulling, pulling on this surface. 128 00:13:56,270 --> 00:14:00,590 And it's going to be fluctuating because this thing doesn't just move in a straight line. 129 00:14:01,070 --> 00:14:13,250 So a fluctuating polar force and then something to pull in the back surface tension or balanced forces which tend to pull it back to circular. 130 00:14:14,450 --> 00:14:18,710 And. Under those sorts of driving. 131 00:14:18,920 --> 00:14:22,010 These cells will do a persistent random walk. 132 00:14:22,520 --> 00:14:27,680 And indeed, that's pretty much what they do on a large length scale. 133 00:14:31,850 --> 00:14:36,880 That's the physics version. Now let's look at reality. In the body. 134 00:14:37,150 --> 00:14:41,260 These things move through the extracellular matrix. 135 00:14:42,220 --> 00:14:49,930 What the extracellular matrix is, is that in between the various organs of the body, in many places in the body. 136 00:14:50,080 --> 00:14:57,050 We end up with, um, we have. A basically a gloopy network of, uh. 137 00:14:58,160 --> 00:15:00,340 Fibres, mucus fibres. 138 00:15:00,350 --> 00:15:09,410 So basically the body doesn't really have state bases in anything that's not a living cell is filled up with this extracellular matrix. 139 00:15:10,450 --> 00:15:14,890 These are electron micrographs of the extracellular matrix. 140 00:15:15,550 --> 00:15:22,090 And so if cells move they have to move through this extracellular matrix. 141 00:15:22,930 --> 00:15:31,120 And I always find the next movie a bit worrying because the reality and the simple physics models are really a little bit different from each other. 142 00:15:31,810 --> 00:15:39,220 This is a white blood cell. And the people who made this movie were referenced at the end. 143 00:15:39,370 --> 00:15:48,190 We're really quite keen on the fact that they'd actually managed to image a white blood cell moving through the extracellular matrix. 144 00:15:48,220 --> 00:15:52,270 You can imagine that's a really very difficult thing to do. These are inside the body. 145 00:15:53,720 --> 00:15:59,630 For a long time, people have have images of a white blood cell moving along a surface. 146 00:15:59,990 --> 00:16:06,200 You'll see some of those in the movie. Um, and the idea of this movie is that we can do much better with that, 147 00:16:06,620 --> 00:16:11,080 but also the way it moves, the way it moves around its cytoplasm, the way it pushes. 148 00:16:11,090 --> 00:16:17,270 This is the 2D version. Yeah. The way it moves around the cytoplasm is really rather complicated. 149 00:16:18,500 --> 00:16:21,670 And we always have to remember that the physics models are simple. 150 00:16:21,680 --> 00:16:26,540 They can tell us some things. But there are lots of things that they can't tell us. 151 00:16:27,570 --> 00:16:32,790 So this is it moving through the cytoplasm. This is a real movie of a real cell. 152 00:16:33,060 --> 00:16:39,420 So white blood cell and white blood cells are pretty nippy because they have to chase bacteria and eat them. 153 00:16:40,750 --> 00:16:45,700 This is what we always used to show. There it is, chasing a bacteria which is going to eat. 154 00:16:46,750 --> 00:16:52,240 Okay. And here. It is moving around. 155 00:16:54,590 --> 00:17:07,740 Yeah, that's a reference. I think that the big questions about single cell motion are now not really physics. 156 00:17:08,240 --> 00:17:16,020 They're the biology and the detailed chemistry going on inside this cell, which makes things happen. 157 00:17:17,550 --> 00:17:25,140 In my view, the exciting thing at the moment. But it's in terms of some models that you get and also in terms of matching to reality. 158 00:17:25,500 --> 00:17:33,360 Places where physics is likely to make the best difference is what happens if you have lots of cells. 159 00:17:35,980 --> 00:17:42,150 So this is a picture of an epithelium. Epithelium are all over in the body. 160 00:17:42,150 --> 00:17:46,290 They're basically one dimensional sheets of cells. 161 00:17:46,890 --> 00:17:50,430 The skin is a beautiful example sorry two dimensional. 162 00:17:50,550 --> 00:17:58,860 The skin is a beautiful example of that. Most of the organs of the body aligned by these cells. 163 00:17:59,820 --> 00:18:03,210 And the picture here is the picture from wiki. All right. 164 00:18:03,630 --> 00:18:06,840 And they tend to form these two dimensional layers. 165 00:18:08,390 --> 00:18:14,299 And that's great, right? Because theoretical physicists like to dimensions, everything is much easier in two dimensions. 166 00:18:14,300 --> 00:18:26,580 So these things are good. And one of the famous model systems for looking at how these cells move is to take the cells out of the body, 167 00:18:26,580 --> 00:18:32,850 where it's hard to see them, and to put them on some sort of substrate like a petri dish. 168 00:18:33,360 --> 00:18:39,810 So what you end up with is cells sitting in a confluent layer on a petri dish. 169 00:18:40,680 --> 00:18:44,480 So these things are hanging on to each other through junctions. 170 00:18:44,490 --> 00:18:47,700 They're all sort of that bit like a foam if you like. 171 00:18:48,090 --> 00:18:56,580 And they're attached to each other through things called adherence junctions, which are junctions made by the biology. 172 00:18:57,210 --> 00:19:01,890 So I'm looking down here on this cell layer. I'm looking at the top of the cells. 173 00:19:02,280 --> 00:19:11,280 And we tend to forget if we're not careful about the fact that there's actually a two plus a bit dimensional shape here. 174 00:19:14,540 --> 00:19:19,369 So it's pretty obvious that these cells can't quite move in the same way as a single cell, 175 00:19:19,370 --> 00:19:24,700 because if they all take off in random directions, there's going to be all [INAUDIBLE] let loose, right? 176 00:19:24,710 --> 00:19:28,400 They're going to be pulling on each other. That's that's really a bad thing to do. 177 00:19:28,400 --> 00:19:33,830 You're just going to be wasting energy. So how do they move? 178 00:19:35,630 --> 00:19:39,550 Well. One way is flocking. 179 00:19:40,240 --> 00:19:46,990 This is very like the starlings. This is a picture of cells flocking. 180 00:19:47,770 --> 00:19:52,960 By flocking, I mean they all decide to move in the same direction. 181 00:19:55,290 --> 00:20:01,920 You see this? Um, these are actually taken actually from a, uh, a real life biological system. 182 00:20:02,220 --> 00:20:06,810 The egg chamber of Drosophila. The egg of a fruit fly. 183 00:20:07,840 --> 00:20:13,480 This is the fruit fly egg. And what happens is that these cells flock. 184 00:20:14,590 --> 00:20:18,820 They move round and round the inside of this egg. 185 00:20:20,560 --> 00:20:25,870 No one's sure why. It may just be because they're active. 186 00:20:26,230 --> 00:20:33,090 And so if they're active, they're taking in energy from their surroundings and they've got to dissipate it somehow. 187 00:20:33,100 --> 00:20:37,840 They've got to do something. So the best thing they can do is go round and round. 188 00:20:38,800 --> 00:20:43,060 But maybe not. All right. And this is another movie showing the same thing. 189 00:20:44,200 --> 00:20:53,080 This is now in a minute we'll see the cells nicely in colour so you can follow them going round and round this chamber in Drosophila. 190 00:20:54,420 --> 00:21:03,000 So that's one thing these guys do. They flock. They also do this active turbulence type thing. 191 00:21:03,120 --> 00:21:10,260 Remember, we have this turbulent like behaviour where things move in a very chaotic way. 192 00:21:11,250 --> 00:21:14,370 So this is a picture of active turbulence in cells. 193 00:21:15,640 --> 00:21:19,299 And I might say it sells. Plated. It sells is two dimensional. 194 00:21:19,300 --> 00:21:22,480 Love sells taken out of the body and put on the surface. 195 00:21:23,460 --> 00:21:32,810 Okay. And then they jam. What's happening is that they are dividing and so they're getting denser so it's harder for them to move. 196 00:21:33,290 --> 00:21:37,280 So these guys at late times in the movie are jams. 197 00:21:37,430 --> 00:21:43,220 They're still wiggling a bit, but they can't move relative to each other. 198 00:21:45,980 --> 00:21:50,620 And. Let me tell you about my favourite experiments. 199 00:21:51,280 --> 00:21:55,960 These are experiments carried out in Milan, um, some years ago. 200 00:21:57,620 --> 00:22:08,750 And what they show is cells changing from doing this, flocking the other way around, from doing that to turbulence behaviour to doing flocking. 201 00:22:10,370 --> 00:22:13,850 So on the left we sort of have a picture. This is a velocity plot. 202 00:22:14,630 --> 00:22:19,730 The different colours are different, um, directions of motion of these things. 203 00:22:20,330 --> 00:22:27,410 Okay. So here I have active turbulence with small random velocities. 204 00:22:29,290 --> 00:22:32,650 On this side you can see the arrows are much bigger. 205 00:22:33,490 --> 00:22:42,610 These are much bigger velocities and they're more or less they're much more coherent and much more moving in the same direction. 206 00:22:43,150 --> 00:22:46,810 I'll show you a movie in a minute of that happening. 207 00:22:48,920 --> 00:22:54,230 This is. Okay, so. So what makes them change from one to the other? 208 00:22:55,690 --> 00:22:59,200 And the answer is that they add this chemical Rab five A. 209 00:23:01,020 --> 00:23:08,999 No one's quite sure what it does, but people think it locks up the junctions between the cells in some way. 210 00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:13,830 It changes the forces actually acting between these cells. 211 00:23:15,830 --> 00:23:22,850 And if you watch this five A and you look at the velocity, this is without the RGB five A. 212 00:23:23,960 --> 00:23:31,550 The red line is what happens when you add this red five a and you can see the velocity. 213 00:23:32,120 --> 00:23:36,010 The mean velocity goes up. A lot. 214 00:23:37,930 --> 00:23:43,630 And this is a biological experiment. So a lot means this is amazing, right? 215 00:23:43,660 --> 00:23:50,950 Normally biological experiments, if you have error bars and they don't overlap you're doing really well. 216 00:23:51,880 --> 00:23:55,060 So this you can actually um believe. 217 00:23:55,510 --> 00:24:00,580 And so the next one shows the movie of this velocity thing happening. 218 00:24:00,790 --> 00:24:07,890 So on the left it's doing this act of turbulence, small random velocities on the right. 219 00:24:07,900 --> 00:24:14,800 It's what happens when you add the Rab five a large correlated velocities. 220 00:24:16,400 --> 00:24:25,630 Uh. Can you move? Yes. Somehow I just play that one again. 221 00:24:27,630 --> 00:24:31,910 Good luck. Yes. Really makes a difference. This chemical makes a difference. 222 00:24:31,910 --> 00:24:36,950 We're not quite sure how, but we think it might be something to do with what's happening. 223 00:24:37,280 --> 00:24:44,870 Um, on the boundaries between the cells. One more way. 224 00:24:44,870 --> 00:24:49,340 They move. We've got jamming, we've got active turbulence and we've got flocking. 225 00:24:50,780 --> 00:24:55,160 The last one is what happens when I put these cells in confinement. 226 00:24:55,200 --> 00:25:01,090 If I put them in a small sort of container, and this is really an excuse to show you the nice movies. 227 00:25:01,580 --> 00:25:04,879 All right. So this is what happens to cells when you put them in a container. 228 00:25:04,880 --> 00:25:14,120 Active turbulence. But then the active turbulence changes and you end up with them going round and round. 229 00:25:14,780 --> 00:25:19,310 It's a bit like that echo chamber in Drosophila stuff. It's probably related to that okay. 230 00:25:20,820 --> 00:25:26,880 So it's because the turbulence is basically cut off by the boundaries. 231 00:25:27,210 --> 00:25:34,880 It becomes a coherent flow. You can see that in all sorts of different active matter. 232 00:25:35,630 --> 00:25:42,620 This rather nice movie is. Filament driven by motor proteins. 233 00:25:42,620 --> 00:25:47,209 And again they go round and round. Right. There's no external driving. 234 00:25:47,210 --> 00:25:52,590 They're driving themselves. They form this lovely swirling pattern. 235 00:25:54,030 --> 00:26:00,390 And occasionally there's an instability, occasionally in the swelling screws up and then it starts again, 236 00:26:00,660 --> 00:26:04,230 and then you get this instability happening again. 237 00:26:07,290 --> 00:26:32,340 You can see it in macroscopic active matter as well. Yeah. 238 00:26:33,720 --> 00:26:37,530 Okay, so there are lots of different ways these cells move. 239 00:26:38,130 --> 00:26:45,300 We'd like to model it because we'd like to understand what's going on. I mean, we don't understand what's going on, but, um. 240 00:26:46,980 --> 00:26:58,890 But it's a start. And let me just stress, okay, that if there are any pilot biologists in the audience and apologise now, we tend to think that this. 241 00:27:08,770 --> 00:27:17,169 And and in a way, trying to talk to biologists is one of the most exciting things to try and put together our approaches, 242 00:27:17,170 --> 00:27:26,770 which minimise any complications, and biologists who get really upset when you start trying to not put in absolutely everything. 243 00:27:27,310 --> 00:27:33,250 Um, and yeah, reality is in the middle and some problems are amenable to physics. 244 00:27:33,250 --> 00:27:37,110 We hope some will need the biological detail. 245 00:27:37,330 --> 00:27:43,000 Biology is very annoying. I mean, it is messy. Um, and you keep going. 246 00:27:43,000 --> 00:27:49,000 I mean, if you're a physicist, you tend to turn out and think, okay, that sort of nice principle, then it's going to work and it doesn't. 247 00:27:49,900 --> 00:27:53,050 Yeah. But anyway, we want to model these cells. 248 00:27:53,290 --> 00:27:57,310 We would like a model of how these cells move. 249 00:27:57,880 --> 00:28:03,800 Because even though, you know it's a physics model it's only the basics. 250 00:28:03,820 --> 00:28:08,230 But at least then we can take our model and say actually in biology, this this happens. 251 00:28:08,500 --> 00:28:14,110 Can we make it do that? What ingredients of the model are most important? 252 00:28:14,920 --> 00:28:24,640 So I'm going to tell you about a thing called the vertex model. The vertex model is the go to model of collective cell motion. 253 00:28:25,680 --> 00:28:28,810 And a call out to Yan, who is somewhere in the audience. 254 00:28:28,840 --> 00:28:35,280 Okay, who's a postdoc here? And it's Yan who has taught me everything I know about the vertex model and provided 255 00:28:35,280 --> 00:28:41,460 many of these movies and is here to answer any nasty questions you might have asked. 256 00:28:44,200 --> 00:28:52,149 So the vertex model has to look like these cells. So it's a model of um polygons with edges which are joined together. 257 00:28:52,150 --> 00:28:57,250 So it's just a load of polygons with edges. It grew out of foam models. 258 00:28:57,280 --> 00:29:03,250 It looks a bit like a phone. And it's not allowed to have gaps because this thing is confluent. 259 00:29:05,010 --> 00:29:09,120 We need some sort of energy which goes with this vertex model. 260 00:29:09,960 --> 00:29:16,770 So the energy is that we have an area term which says we have a preferred area. 261 00:29:17,100 --> 00:29:23,550 And there's an elastic force which adds energy if I move away from the preferred area. 262 00:29:25,260 --> 00:29:31,830 And then we have a perimeter term which is the same, but for the perimeter of each of these cells. 263 00:29:32,890 --> 00:29:34,930 So pretty simple, really. 264 00:29:37,070 --> 00:29:46,850 If it's going to have anything to do with how these cells move, it has to do jamming, flocking, active turbulence and what happens in confinement. 265 00:29:47,060 --> 00:29:50,930 So we're going to go through those one by one. Does it work? Can you get jamming. 266 00:29:51,380 --> 00:29:54,560 Can you get the rest of them. Yeah. 267 00:29:55,250 --> 00:30:03,830 So jamming. And it's really because you can see jamming in this model that people realise that maybe it is a good model of cells. 268 00:30:04,160 --> 00:30:08,860 Sorry. This. Oh. I was going to say it was a very busy slide. 269 00:30:09,010 --> 00:30:12,040 The city can't cope with itself. Yeah. 270 00:30:12,610 --> 00:30:16,910 Um. Is working on here now. 271 00:30:19,790 --> 00:30:22,910 OOP. Phew. Right. 272 00:30:22,930 --> 00:30:28,150 Let's hope it stays like that. Obvious that it also thought this slide might be a bit much, but in mine. 273 00:30:28,820 --> 00:30:38,560 Um, okay. So sometime. So the control parameter, the important parameter in this model turns out to be the important dimensionless parameter. 274 00:30:38,800 --> 00:30:46,410 Turns out to be the target perimeter area divided by the square root of the target. 275 00:30:46,420 --> 00:30:52,680 Um, the target area. That's this axis here. 276 00:30:55,200 --> 00:30:58,950 Over here for lots more values. 277 00:30:58,950 --> 00:31:03,300 Well, values up to 3.81. This thing is a solid. 278 00:31:04,020 --> 00:31:11,130 What I mean by a solid is that you need a finite force to get these cells to move relative to each other. 279 00:31:12,490 --> 00:31:24,130 At 3.81. It becomes a liquid, a fluid, and if it's fluid, you only need a very tiny force, an infinitesimal force, to get these things to move. 280 00:31:24,190 --> 00:31:28,030 Think of the atoms in a liquid. If you push them very, very. 281 00:31:29,390 --> 00:31:33,709 If you push them gently, they will move relative to each other in the solid. 282 00:31:33,710 --> 00:31:38,420 You have to push quite hard to get the atoms to move relative to each other. 283 00:31:39,660 --> 00:31:44,280 Here's the centre of the cells, how they move in the solid state. 284 00:31:44,400 --> 00:31:50,640 They just wriggle around the fixed point, and in the liquid state, they move relative to each other. 285 00:31:53,760 --> 00:32:00,209 If you then increase the pushing force, of course it becomes easier to see that fluid phase. 286 00:32:00,210 --> 00:32:04,470 It becomes easier to get them to move relative to each other. 287 00:32:05,840 --> 00:32:14,870 And what caused a great deal of excitement about five years ago is that people measured this solid to fluid transition in real cells, 288 00:32:15,260 --> 00:32:20,150 and they found it happened to the value of this parameter equal to 3.81. 289 00:32:21,260 --> 00:32:27,200 And this was very exciting. And so people then messages and lots of other different sorts of cells. 290 00:32:27,380 --> 00:32:31,790 And found it was between. It wasn't 3.81 but it was 3.81 ish. 291 00:32:33,920 --> 00:32:43,330 Okay. And the physics makes sense. The physics makes sense that these things can be very tightly bound and look very much like a solid layer, 292 00:32:43,700 --> 00:32:48,140 really, of hexagons, or they can move relative to each other. 293 00:32:51,400 --> 00:32:54,920 So then we have to see them flock. That's fairly easy. 294 00:32:54,940 --> 00:33:05,020 This is a sort of be check model thing again. If you put on some sort of velocity on these particles and you allow the velocity to align. 295 00:33:07,070 --> 00:33:12,140 Make them behave a little bit like single cells with velocities which are correlated. 296 00:33:12,620 --> 00:33:23,239 Locking works very beautifully in these models. And then you run out of turbulence. 297 00:33:23,240 --> 00:33:31,500 But that's a bit more tricky. And indeed, it's what we have been working on, uh, in the last year or so. 298 00:33:32,830 --> 00:33:44,460 And. Let me just explain as a sort of background to how you get this active turbulence, this idea of contact, inhibition of locomotion. 299 00:33:46,460 --> 00:33:49,670 This really shows how biology works. 300 00:33:49,670 --> 00:33:55,830 And, um. In a way, it's not a scientific fact. 301 00:33:55,840 --> 00:34:00,959 It's become a belief in the community. Contact. 302 00:34:00,960 --> 00:34:03,990 Inhibition of motion was first. Um. 303 00:34:05,260 --> 00:34:11,830 First appeared in a very beautiful and famous paper by Abercrombie in 1953. 304 00:34:12,100 --> 00:34:18,249 And he indeed spent some of his career in Oxford and what he discovered in experiments. 305 00:34:18,250 --> 00:34:24,579 If two cells come towards each other, what they tend to do is they don't like each other and they tend to go away from each other. 306 00:34:24,580 --> 00:34:27,850 So cells tend to move away from each other. 307 00:34:27,850 --> 00:34:34,740 They tend to repel each other. That has evolved over time. 308 00:34:35,990 --> 00:34:40,970 Um, so that now when people say contact inhibition of locomotion, 309 00:34:41,300 --> 00:34:50,840 what they actually mean is that cells behave in a rather different way in a colony when they're all connected to each other than they do in reality. 310 00:34:51,870 --> 00:34:56,880 And one story is that in a colony they tend not to form these lamellar podia. 311 00:34:57,510 --> 00:35:01,650 They tend not to want to move in any particular direction. 312 00:35:02,070 --> 00:35:06,540 And so they tend not to pull on the substrate and move themselves around. 313 00:35:07,950 --> 00:35:11,040 Does make sense that that that happens, right? 314 00:35:11,040 --> 00:35:15,270 Because it would be a waste of energy to try and move in lots of different directions. 315 00:35:17,630 --> 00:35:25,980 But. The cells do move. So what are the forces interacting if they're not these polar forces pulling on the surface? 316 00:35:26,730 --> 00:35:30,300 And the answer is probably forces between cells. 317 00:35:31,080 --> 00:35:35,159 Forces because the cells are joined to each other and they're all wriggling about. 318 00:35:35,160 --> 00:35:44,430 So they're tending to pull on each other. And that slightly vague explanation is because we don't really understand what's going on. 319 00:35:44,580 --> 00:35:48,330 But probably forces between cells are important. 320 00:35:48,450 --> 00:35:52,980 Makes sense. They are. Why do they bother hanging on to each other if they're not important? 321 00:35:53,550 --> 00:35:56,940 And that's become known as contact inhibition of locomotion. 322 00:35:57,120 --> 00:36:03,000 But there really is no firm evidence out there that this is anything but a bit of a relief, really. 323 00:36:04,740 --> 00:36:09,510 So what we did is we took these vertex models and we put in the interactions between cells. 324 00:36:10,790 --> 00:36:18,260 And if you put in the interactions between cells. Very nicely, you get something where the velocities are rather random. 325 00:36:19,250 --> 00:36:27,320 And if you make those interactions stronger, you get something where the velocities look even more efficiently random. 326 00:36:27,710 --> 00:36:32,900 And you can look at the various properties of this state. And indeed it looks like active turbulence. 327 00:36:33,740 --> 00:36:37,850 And you might worry about the shape of the cells. And we do. 328 00:36:41,440 --> 00:36:45,460 But then we said, okay, let's take these cells and let's put them in a confined state. 329 00:36:45,760 --> 00:36:49,420 We didn't put them in a box because it's harder to do a box. So we put them in a channel. 330 00:36:49,750 --> 00:36:55,780 And we know from active metal theories, uh, which are not to do with cells, that things will move down a channel. 331 00:36:55,780 --> 00:36:59,710 If you can find this active turbulence. It will move down the channel. 332 00:37:00,790 --> 00:37:03,819 And this is very much man's work, very recent stuff. Okay. 333 00:37:03,820 --> 00:37:10,150 So you put it in a channel and you wait for it to move down the channel, and the wretched thing won't go anywhere. 334 00:37:12,440 --> 00:37:18,560 So what actually turns out to get it right is that. 335 00:37:20,760 --> 00:37:31,120 In the moguls at the moment. We dissipate the energy with friction sitting on the substrate, and they give the friction to the surface. 336 00:37:32,230 --> 00:37:41,950 The question was often in biology, what you can have is these cells essentially suspended in space with without the petri dish below them. 337 00:37:42,730 --> 00:37:52,570 And if we replace this friction type viscosity with its friction type dissipation with viscosity type dissipation. 338 00:37:54,200 --> 00:38:01,740 Then. Everything works beautifully and they take off and move down this channel. 339 00:38:03,770 --> 00:38:14,420 So what we have now is a model which can reproduce all those four different sorts of motion in cells. 340 00:38:17,960 --> 00:38:21,350 Details are still to be worked out. 341 00:38:22,640 --> 00:38:27,380 Not just us, but many people all over the world are working on models a bit like this, 342 00:38:28,220 --> 00:38:35,870 and trying to compare them to experiments and trying to understand what's right and what's wrong. 343 00:38:36,650 --> 00:38:40,300 Um, and. Indeed, Adrian. 344 00:38:40,630 --> 00:38:43,390 Uh, in the last talk today will talk about. 345 00:38:43,840 --> 00:38:52,270 I think while I didn't was going to talk about said that they be careful, but they have some beautiful data on how skin cells move. 346 00:38:52,510 --> 00:39:00,790 And we want to try and match this sort of modelling to the skin cells to find out what's right about it and what's wrong about it. 347 00:39:05,300 --> 00:39:10,640 And it's a fun model. Yeah. And it's a fun experimental system of just having cells on the surface. 348 00:39:10,640 --> 00:39:15,050 But real cells don't move on Petri dishes. They move in people. So what? 349 00:39:16,370 --> 00:39:20,930 When I'm talking about cell motion in people in vivo. 350 00:39:21,860 --> 00:39:25,790 What sort of problems can we address with this sort of physics? 351 00:39:27,010 --> 00:39:34,270 And this really is I think people are realising this actually. We can say something about how cells move. 352 00:39:34,720 --> 00:39:41,860 Building on years of really beautiful work with biologists who are asking questions in a slightly different way. 353 00:39:43,080 --> 00:39:49,020 So I'm going to finish by just really showing you some movies of the sort of things that are happening in real systems. 354 00:39:50,110 --> 00:39:59,899 One place is wound healing. These are, um, cells where you had a layer of cells and you basically take them out from the middle. 355 00:39:59,900 --> 00:40:06,680 So it's just like a human wound. And you ask how these cells then move to fill up the space. 356 00:40:07,630 --> 00:40:11,840 So these are real experiments. These cells are moving. 357 00:40:12,080 --> 00:40:17,870 They're moving to fill up the space in the middle of the wound. 358 00:40:21,280 --> 00:40:25,750 This is cell sorting. I love this experiment. 359 00:40:26,590 --> 00:40:31,600 Okay, so what this is, is as a starfish embryo, a baby starfish. 360 00:40:32,260 --> 00:40:37,629 And what the experimentalists did was, um, a starfish. 361 00:40:37,630 --> 00:40:44,470 Embryos is is composed of two different sorts of cells, which in theoretical physics language are red and green. 362 00:40:45,640 --> 00:40:51,070 And what the experimentalists did is take these embryos and basically mash them up. 363 00:40:51,460 --> 00:40:56,530 So you ended up with the red and green cells completely random. 364 00:40:57,250 --> 00:41:01,570 And then they just waited. And over the next day or so. 365 00:41:01,900 --> 00:41:09,260 What's happened is that these cells. Started forming, uh, coherent structures. 366 00:41:09,260 --> 00:41:13,670 So these things are a few green cells across. These are a few red cells across. 367 00:41:13,880 --> 00:41:18,860 So you get something which looks like phase separation and say an all the water system. 368 00:41:19,910 --> 00:41:26,719 And then it becomes even more complicated because the Reds and the Greens organise themselves so 369 00:41:26,720 --> 00:41:34,820 that you get all the green cells in the middle and all the red cells almost around the outside. 370 00:41:35,990 --> 00:41:40,850 Somehow nature is able to organise itself from a state like that. 371 00:41:42,200 --> 00:41:46,670 To a state like this and we don't understand how. 372 00:41:47,570 --> 00:41:52,340 There are theories, but there are best partial theories. 373 00:41:54,740 --> 00:41:58,490 This is an example of embryogenesis in the starfish. 374 00:42:00,540 --> 00:42:04,350 This is the fruit fly. This is a baby Drosophila. 375 00:42:04,890 --> 00:42:08,970 And each of those white dots is a cell. 376 00:42:10,050 --> 00:42:17,700 And this is the development of Drosophila over a period of some hours. 377 00:42:19,710 --> 00:42:24,180 And what you see. Is amazing mechanics. 378 00:42:24,190 --> 00:42:28,330 The cells suddenly take off and move from one place to another. 379 00:42:29,140 --> 00:42:35,290 These are active particles. This is collective motion of active particles. 380 00:42:36,210 --> 00:42:47,460 It shows that nature is much better than we are of understanding these out of equilibrium systems and exploiting them to give patterns. 381 00:42:49,330 --> 00:43:03,909 This is a very similar setup, happens very early in the life of a human embryo, where an egg which is um, originally spherical, 382 00:43:03,910 --> 00:43:11,650 is a ball of cells which is spherical has to change into something which isn't spherical anymore, and it does it by suddenly. 383 00:43:12,960 --> 00:43:16,770 In vaccinating suddenly their large scale flows. 384 00:43:19,100 --> 00:43:23,710 What's happening is an amazing mix of genetics, which I haven't talked about at all. 385 00:43:23,720 --> 00:43:26,870 The smallest scale genetics is driving chemistry, 386 00:43:26,870 --> 00:43:34,999 which is somehow signalling to the molecules that they have to start these flows off, and then physics about how it flows, 387 00:43:35,000 --> 00:43:43,400 and we've been concentrating on the physics bit, makes absolutely clear this is a multi-scale thing of which we've looked at just one bit. 388 00:43:44,270 --> 00:43:48,080 So let me put it again because I think it's very beautiful. Okay. 389 00:43:51,140 --> 00:44:00,110 And understanding this in the fruit fly. At the moment we are trying to do the trick which which actually we can do quite nicely with these vertex. 390 00:44:00,200 --> 00:44:12,890 Well, we can do bits of it quite nicely with the vertex models. And then in humans is probably the next big frontier in, in this bit of biophysics. 391 00:44:13,860 --> 00:44:20,070 So that's a good place to stop. Uh, citrus Sofala go into a fruit fly. 392 00:44:21,840 --> 00:44:25,540 And then. I'll put up my. 393 00:44:26,710 --> 00:44:29,020 Conclusions. Thank you very much for listening.