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Claire Dessalles07/09/2023, 14:00Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Morphogenesis, the process by which tissues acquire their shape, hinges on a finely orchestrated collective motion of cells autonomously choreographing themselves to a well-defined final position.
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The goal of my project is to understand how geometry and topology controls the spontaneous organization of cells that drives morphogenesis, i.e. the growth from a 3D surface to tissues with complex... -
Daphne Laan (EPFL)07/09/2023, 14:15Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Ciliates are free swimming single-celled organisms that execute complex behaviours such as obstacle avoidance and hunting. These organisms are covered by arrays of thousands of active filaments, known as cilia, that beat to generate flows. To understand if behaviour can be encoded by cilia organization and the trade-offs between locomotion and predation risk, we analyze the interactions...
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Simone Cicolini07/09/2023, 14:30Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
How biological form emerges from cell fate decisions and tissue remodelling is a fundamental question in development biology. We investigate this interplay during the process of vein refinement in Drosophila pupal wing. By following reporters of signalling activity dynamically, together with tissue flows, we show that vein refinement arises from cell fate adjustments controlled by a signalling...
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Mathieu Dedenon (University of Geneva)07/09/2023, 14:45Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Biological tissues generate active mechanical stress, originating from cellular force dipoles. Active fluid theory predicts this active stress to drive a spontaneous flow transition in a confined geometry.
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Indeed, polar cells on a confining disc are observed to rotate with spiral orientation. However at a later stage, tissue growth induces cell reorientation into a static aster.
To explain... -
Shiling Liang (Institute of Physics, EPFL)07/09/2023, 15:00Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Living systems are out-of-equilibrium and exhibit emergent selection phenomena that break equilibrium symmetries. These phenomena are possible because non-equilibrium conditions expand the non-equilibrium phase space where complex biochemical processes can lie in. We use the matrix-tree theorem to derive universal thermodynamic bounds on these symmetry-breaking features in biochemical systems....
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Vincent Hickl (Empa)07/09/2023, 15:15Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Collective behaviors at interfaces are ubiquitous in living systems and play a crucial role in guiding macroscale phenomena like tissue morphogenesis and the spread of infections. While collections of biological active particles must contend with complex environments, much remains unknown about the effects of substrate geometry on their self-organization. We use bacterial colonies at...
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Friso Douma (EPFL)07/09/2023, 15:30Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
The centriole is a cylindrical organelle essential for microtubule organization. Centrioles duplicate exactly once every cell cycle through the formation of a procentriole orthogonally to an existing centriole. How the single site of procentriole formation on the cylinder is determined and what mechanisms ensure that precisely one procentriole is formed remains incompletely understood. We use...
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Vojislav Gligorovski (Laboratory of the Physics of Biological Systems, Institute of Physics, EPFL)07/09/2023, 15:45Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Cellular doubling time, as a crucial determinant of fitness, was optimized during the course of evolution. However, cells of different species exhibit hugely varying doubling times, ranging from a few minutes, to several days. To understand the constraints and trade-offs that dictate cell-cycle dynamics, we created a budding yeast strain in which the doubling time can be controlled...
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Mukund Krishna Kothari (University of Geneva)07/09/2023, 16:00Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
To explore how feedback between cell polarity and mechanics guides self-organization, we develop a theoretical model of cells described as active polar beads mechanically interacting with each other. The model is motivated by the self-organization of stem cells into a rosette structure in the early stages of organoid growth. A key ingredient is the active interaction force $A(\vec{p}_{i} -...
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Marco Labagnara07/09/2023, 16:15Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
When double-strand breaks happens to the DNA, the cell arrests at the DNA damage checkpoint, preventing its entry into mitosis until the breaks are eventually repaired and the cell can proceed to mitosis. If the breaks persist, cells may bypass the checkpoint, this is called override. It is known that the override time depends on the number of breaks, but how the cell measure this number isn't...
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Prof. Suliana Manley (EPFL)07/09/2023, 17:00Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Mitochondria are heterogeneous organelles best known for their role in energy production through oxidative phosphorylation. Yet, they possess their own genetic material, encoding for key ox-phos proteins. Thus, they must divide to proliferate, which they do asynchronously from their host cell cycle. How do they ensure network maintenance and homeostasis? Using a customized structured...
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Davide Cois (Epfl)07/09/2023, 17:30Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Molecular chaperones are ubiquitous highly conserved proteins across all domains and living systems depend on them for cellular homeostasis. The chaperone machinery is able to disassemble toxic aggregates, which are a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases. In vitro and in vivo studies, for different species, provide experimental evidence of aggregate dispersal by chaperone activity. However,...
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Mrs Mahsa Barzegarkeshteli (EPFL)07/09/2023, 17:45Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
We will focus on how C. elegans worm responds to sensory cues depending on its internal brain state. They can be defined as the patterns of neuronal activity that are highly predictive of behaviour. Recent technological advances have made it possible to image whole-brain calcium activity at cellular resolution in freely moving animals. From changes in behaviour and neural dynamics, internal...
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Augustin Muster (Department of Physics, University of Fribourg)07/09/2023, 18:00Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Random optical fields induce interactions between colloidal particles. Being the forces induced by the black body radiation the best known example. These fluctuation-induced interactions can be tuned by choosing an appropriate spectral energy density, hence it is possible to engineer the dynamics and equilibrium configurations. Using a coupled electric and magnetic dipoles model we present in...
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Maxime Scheder07/09/2023, 18:15Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Meiosis in S. Cerevisiae is a complex process which is tightly regulated by a large gene regulatory network. Such regulatory networks depend on numerous unknown parameters. Instead of modelling the gene network directly, the interest is set toward modelling the decision process through only few external measurable parameters such as the nutrient concentration. To this end, the analogy of the...
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Elif Gencturk07/09/2023, 18:30Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
I regard caenorhabditis elegans, as a first step to understand more complex brains. I believe that microfluidics is the missing ingredient to breakthroughs. I will build microfluidic chips in which a single worm can hatch from an egg, be fed in a controlled manner with bacteria, and be imaged for whole-brain activity throughout its life while receiving stimuli to spark information processing...
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Matthieu Schmidt (EPFL)07/09/2023, 18:45Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
In this study, I investigate factors contributing to consistent behavior throughout an individual's lifespan in C. elegans. Using optogenetic stimulation, I redefine individuality by examining stimulus-induced behavioral responses. I then explore serotonin's role in maintaining behavioral consistency by optogenetically controlling serotonergic neuron NSM. A custom high-throughput setup tracks...
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Vivek Jaysukhlal Maradia08/09/2023, 12:00Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Proton therapy is a promising cancer treatment, but uncertainties due to anatomical changes and motion limit its effectiveness. To overcome this, Ultra-fast treatments might make tumor irradiations within a single. To enable ultra-fast treatment delivery, we investigate methods to reduce beam-on and dead time. By optimizing beam optics, using a dynamic ridge filter, and employing spot-reduced...
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Maximilian Sohmen (Med. Univ. Innsbruck)08/09/2023, 12:30Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Combining adaptive optics (AO) with multi-photon techniques is a powerful approach to image deep into biological tissue. Here, we present a new, fast and robust sensorless multi-photon AO scheme. We study our scheme in numerical simulations and in experiments with a novel, optofluidic wavefront shaping device that is transmissive, refractive, polarisation-independent, and broadband. We...
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Peter Strassmann08/09/2023, 12:45Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Leonhard Med is a scientific IT-platform to securely store, manage, and process sensitive data. The digitalization of healthcare and medical devices in everyday life allow collecting vast amounts of health-related data, e.g., clinical and -omics data, data from biobanks and from wearables. Researchers transform such data into insights and decision-making tools for precision medicine and...
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Sahand Rahi (EPFL)Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
I will be describing our current efforts using generative deep learning models to create artificial training sets for tracking C. elegans worms using machine learning.
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Lorenzo Scutteri (EPFL)Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
When faced with chromosomal double-strand DNA breaks, cells activate a complex DNA Damage Checkpoint response that arrests the cell cycle and reprograms gene expression. Although the regulators of the core network have been intensively explored, the mechanism of checkpoint override remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we aim to design optogenetically-controlled checkpoint proteins...
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Paolo De Los Rios (Institute of Physics, EPFL)Biophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
Under favourable conditions, proteins fold autonomously, and their native state is the minimum of the free energy. Under adverse conditions, like in the presence of elevated temperatures, non-native states be the true minima of the free energy, leading to protein denaturation and subsequent protein aggregation. All cells possess a set of molecular machines, known as chaperones, that counteract...
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Nils PlähnBiophysics, Medical Physics and Soft MatterTalk
A novel analytical method in magnetic resonance imaging using phase-cycled balanced steady state free precession (PC-bSSFP) was developed for multi-compartment systems. The approach exploits asymmetries in complex PC-bSSFP signal profiles and enables simultaneous quantification of proton fraction, T1 and T2 relaxation times.
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Monte-Carlo simulations and experiments at 3T and 7T in an...
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