题目: Towards a physics of Living Materials

主讲人: Sebastian Fürthauer副教授，奥地利维恩工业大学

时间地点： 2022年5月17日（周二）下午15：00，线上

Zoom Meeting ID: 352 507 6528

Password: 590896

主讲人简介：Sebastian Fürthauer studies the physics of cellular scale processes, such as cell division and cell motility, cells, and active materials more broadly. After earning his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and the Max Planck Institute for Cellular Biology and Genetics, in Dresden, Germany, he did research at the Tata Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences in Hyderabad, India, the Courant Institute at New York University and Harvard University and the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation in New York City. His group at TU-Wien seeks to uncover how cytoskeletal networks function in cells and how cells organize into tissues, using approaches from theoretical and numerical physics.。

Abstract：Living cells move, deform and divide. The engine of these behaviors is the cytoskeleton, a highly crosslinked network of polymer filaments and molecular scale motors that use chemical energy to do work. We develop a theory that predicts how the micro-scale properties of molecular motors and crosslinks tune the networks emergent material properties and generate predictable, and possibly controllable, behaviors. I will present how this theory is constructed, and discuss its implications for cytoskeletal networks in vitro and in vivo, highlighting how it has helped to quantitatively understand motor driven microtubule fluxes in a system made from XCTK2 motors and stabilized microtubules, and how it resolved long-standing puzzles about the motion of microtubules in spindles. I will also discuss how the same theoretical framework can be used to understand contractility of actomyosin networks.