You're welcome to attend my PhD defense that will take place on campus Jussieu on the 4th of December.

This PhD was done in the team of Mechanics of artificial and integrated biological systems, better known as MEBS, under the supervision of Lea-Laetitia Pontani.

Title: Roles of intercellular adhesion and mechanical perturbations as structuration factors of biomimetic emulsions

Date: 04/12/2024

Hour: 15h (Paris hour)

Location: amphi Charpak, between tower 22 and 32, RC level

Short abstract:

 During morphogenesis, bio-chemical signaling and mechanical cues are at play in order to give rise to shape and function to future tissues, influencing each other through a dynamic feedback loop. Still, the role of such mechanical cues on the emergence of structure is not fully understood. In particular, in the context of soft developing tissues or cell aggregates, it is known that the hierarchy of cell-cell adhesion, together with cellular motility, can lead to the self-organization of identified structures, a phenomenon described within the framework of the differential adhesion hypothesis. Nevertheless, these kinds of processes have been mainly studied in biological systems in vivo or in vitro where deciphering the exact influence of individual factors like cell-cell adhesion or forces remains challenging.

In order to tackle this problem, we choose to work in a simplified framework. We use adhesive emulsions as a biomimetic system of epithelial tissues, in which each oil droplet mimics a cell in the tissue and we introduce differentials of adhesion using palindromic DNA sequences as the binders between the droplets. The obtained “proto-tissues” are then flowed inside micro-channels of various geometry that directly define the stress field. We seek to experimentally and theoretically elucidate the influence of local droplet deformations and T1 events on the global behavior of the emulsion flow. Next, we try to correlate those observations to the evolving structure of the emulsion along the channel as a function of the interdroplet adhesion hierarchy.

See you there

PS: the defense will be in english and followed by a pot in the LJP seminar room