Venue: 3.21 Berry Lecture Theatre, HH Wills Physics Labs Building, Tyndall Ave, 3pm

We would like to invite you to attend the Physics Colloquium, which will be held at 3pm on Mondays in 3.21, the Berry Lecture Theatre. The colloquia will be followed by tea and coffee in the staff coffee room. We hope to see you there!

The most imminent event in the series, on the 12th of December, will be presented Prof. Tanniemola Liverpool. Click here for a PDF of the abstract: Colloquium Poster 12th December 2022 (PDF, 487kB)

Abstract:

I will discuss some recent work looking quantitatively at the process of wound healing using ideas from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Wound healing is a highly conserved process required for survival of an animal after tissue damage. The wound repair process is not only of great interest in its own right but is also a laboratory to study complex tissue dynamics and regeneration.

Many wounds involve damage to an epithelial (barrier) tissue (like skin) that separates different regions of the body of a living organism. I will describe some recent work on studying wound healing in two dimensional epithelial tissues of a fruit fly fly pupal wing. This epithelium was chosen because it is transparent and accessible to sophisticated imaging techniques. We use live confocal time-lapse microscopy to follow the behaviour of cells in a tissue before and after wounding.

I will focus on three cell-behaviours that are generally accepted to contribute to wound re-epithelialisation : cell shape deformation, cell division, and cell migration. I will describe how we are beginning to use a combination of theory and experiment to disentangle some of the organising principles behind the complex orchestrated dynamics that lead to wound healing.