Chemical Engineering Seminar
Control of Morphogenetic Flows and Patterning in Dynamic Tissues
Abstract: Embryogenesis couples large-scale tissue flows with precise spatial patterning, yet how dynamic cell movements mediate morphogen signaling and fate specification remains poorly understood.
In the first part of the talk, I will discuss recent work on the physical mechanisms driving avian gastrulation flows. Avian embryos begin as a ~60,000-cell monolayer that undergoes coordinated motion to shape the main body axes. By combining active matter physics and in-vivo experiments, we were able to control tissue flows and the dynamic embryo geometry (size and shape) through distinct, independently controllable mechanisms. In the second part, to bridge flow and fate, I will introduce a mathematical framework for morphogen transport in dynamic tissues — rewriting the advection-reaction-diffusion equations in the cells' moving frame — where cell decisions occur. This framework i) resolves the confounding effect of motion on patterning; ii) reveals how morphogenetic flows mediate morphogen transport and cell-cell interaction ranges; iii) provides two new nondimensional numbers (distinct from Péclet) to assess when and where morphogenesis affects morphogen transport from experimental data.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60249-8
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.04.631293v1
Bio: Mattia Serra is an Assistant Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. Previously, he was a postdoc in applied mathematics at Harvard and obtained a PhD in nonlinear dynamics from ETH Zurich. Selected Awards: ETH Medal Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis (2017), Schmidt Science Fellowship (2018), Hellman Fellowship in Physics (2023), Human Frontier Science Program Early Career Research Award (2024), NSF CAREER Award (2024). Mattia's group develops methods to identify emergent patterns in nonlinear systems---mostly living matter---and mechanistic models to study how early embryos self-organize their form and function.
Group website: https://www.mattiaserra.com/