Carina Dunlop visited the University of Birmingham on Monday 2nd February to give a talk in the Applied Mathematics Seminar.  The title of the talk was Cells, cell sheets and insect embryos: modelling the role of mechanics in tissue development.

It is becoming increasingly clear that mechanical interactions play a crucial role in controlling cellular behaviours in development and morphogenesis. However, it is often unclear how we can use these observations at the cell-level to understand the development of entire tissues. In particular inferring cellular behaviour from tissue-level experimental observations is complicated due to the multiple interactions and feedbacks that are dynamically occurring between cells and their microenvironments.  In the talk, Carina demonstrated two different approaches. In the first, individual based simulations can be used to tackle the problem from the bottom-up by postulating individual cell behaviours before ‘growing’ the tissue in silico. The second adopts a top-down approach using a continuum description of the whole tissue which is integrated with mechanical models for individual cellular behaviour. These models are used to explain cellular self-organization in the paradigm developmental system of Drosophila melanogaster and to infer individual cellular force generation from traction force assays.