This epic paper, which has been a heroic 10 year journey for the lead author, Ricardo Barrientos, is finally out in Cell today! Many thanks to all co-authors, especially Billie Meadowcroft and Andela Saric for their beautiful MD simulations www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Basement membrane turnover controls cell shape

Basement membranes are scaffolds of proteins, like collagen, that give organs shape. During development, basement membranes must adapt to the growing organ. We infer how fast the basement membrane ada...

cell.com

1/ Can a single bacterium learn? No brain, no neurons, just one cell deciding what to do next. Our new paper says yes, and the cell's internal machinery turns out to compute exactly like a recurrent neural network. 🔗 journals.aps.org/prxlife/abstract/10.1103/5zbg-8vll

In about one out of every 1,000 pregnancies, the neural tube, a key nervous system structure, fails to close. @gtsciences.bsky.social is now helping explain why this happens, having uncovered the physics that drive neural tube closure in a pregnancy’s earliest stages. b.gatech.edu/421VdDG

Check our new paper with @glgalea.bsky.social on the mechanics of hindbrain neuropore morphogenesis www.cell.com/current-biol...

Mechanosensitive feedback organizes cell shape and motion during hindbrain neuropore morphogenesis

Pérez-Verdugo et al. show that hindbrain neuropore closure is driven by surface ectoderm actomyosin purse-string tension and active migration. These forces create reproducible patterns of cell elongat...

cell.com

Gabriel Galea@glgalea.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Delighted with this new paper. Key findings I'm most interested in following up: - Mechanical cues impact cell shape long after the cue ends, - Surface ectoderm (SE) cells have cryptic lamellipodia which may enable collective crawling, - SE becomes progressively jammed www.cell.com/current-biol...

Excited to present this work w/ @shilabanerjee.bsky.social next week at APS Global Physics Summit 2026 on mechanical memory and learning in biological tissues. bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Can biological tissues "learn"? Our new preprint shows that epithelial tissues exhibit emergent behaviors akin to unsupervised learning. Local tension remodeling allows cell networks to store long-range memory and program global elasticity properties. Read more here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Reinforcement learning for adaptive control of phenotypically heterogeneous bacterial populations

Bacterial populations display extraordinary resilience to antibiotic stress, driven by diverse physiological states that allow some cells to persist and later repopulate. This phenotypic heterogeneity...

biorxiv.org

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Physical traits of supercompetitors in cell competition | Journal of The Royal Society Interface

Cell competition is a fitness control mechanism in tissues, where less fit cells are eliminated to maintain tissue homeostasis. Two primary mechanisms of cell competition have been identified: contact...

royalsocietypublishing.org

Cell Geometry Limits Metabolic Efficiency www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cell Geometry Limits Bacterial Metabolic Efficiency

Bacterial metabolic strategies are fundamentally linked to their physical form, yet a quantitative understanding of how cell size and shape constrain the efficiency of biomass production remains poorl...

biorxiv.org

Check out our new opinion/review on Organelle Size Control www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Design principles and feedback mechanisms in organelle size control

Intracellular organelles are essential for cellular architecture and function, and their size regulation is critical for maintaining cellular homeosta…

sciencedirect.com

Excited to share our new preprint on bacterial learning, with @sifangwei.bsky.social. Here we show that single bacterial cells can continually learn in dynamic environments, due to an underlying reaction network architecture that resemble a recurrent neural network www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Power-law memory governs bacterial adaptation and learning in fluctuating environments

How do single-celled organisms adapt and learn to survive in dynamic environments without a nervous system? Here, we provide experimental evidence and a theoretical model demonstrating learning-like b...

biorxiv.org

bioRxiv Biophysics@biorxiv-biophys.bsky.social · last yr.

Mechanistic basis for non-exponential bacterial growth https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.29.646116v1

PoLS faculty Dan Goldman has been named a lifetime fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of #Science (@aaas.org)! Congratulations to Dan, and also to the six other @gtresearchnews.bsky.social honorees named this year!

Read about our latest work on centrosome size control, Version of Record now available @elife.bsky.social

PoLS at Georgia Tech@gtpols.bsky.social · 2y ago

When a cell divides, its centrosome splits in two—and cell division can go catastrophically wrong if the two centrosomes grow to different sizes. How does the cell regulate centrosome size? Deb Banerjee and @shilabanerjee.bsky.social present a novel model in a new @elife.bsky.social paper!

Big shout out to Jian Liu, @shilabanerjee.bsky.social and @simonereber.bsky.social for organizing a great subgroup meeting on Physical Cell Biology at #BPS2025 at Los Angeles. And afterwards a very enjoyable lunch for the speakers😁

www.aamc.org/news/press-r...

AAMC Lawsuit Results in Nationwide Temporary Restraining Order on Proposed Drastic Cuts to NIH Funding

Judge grants restraining order after lawsuit led by the AAMC, challenging the legality of the administration’s plan to make cuts to federally funded research.

aamc.org

How can subterranean organisms be observed as they move underground? A recent paper from Dan Goldman's CRAB Lab presents Laser Speckle Imaging (LSI) as a non-invasive way to view organisms as they move through granular media. #Physics #Biology doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Detecting subtle subterranean movement via laser speckle imaging

Summary: Laser speckle imaging non-invasively quantifies subterranean organism activity by detecting nanometer-scale movements.

doi.org

Hi Folks, the Physical Cell Biology subgroup of the BPS is currently searching for a secretary treasurer. We are seeking two nominations to run for an election. DM me if interested. Pleaee Repost.

A betrayal to those who opted for the new framework. Why not simply accept/reject then?

eLife@elife.bsky.social · 2y ago

After listening to community feedback, we will provide a partial feed allowing 93% of eLife authors to continue being indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection. We will also move from the Scopus Journals Collection to the Scopus Preprints Collection. Full update below.

How do physical forces influence spatiotemporal cell patterning during tissue morphogenesis? Our latest preprint integrates theoretical modeling with live imaging of mouse embryos to reveal how mechanosensitive feedback drives self-organized cell patterning during hindbrain neuropore morphogenesis.

bioRxiv Biophysics@biorxiv-biophys.bsky.social · 2y ago

Self-organized cell patterning via mechanical feedback in hindbrain neuropore morphogenesis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.21.624679v1

🎉 Excited to share the news that my group will soon be moving to Georgia Tech to begin a new chapter in the Physics of Living Systems. Grateful for an incredible 5 years at CMU. We’re hiring postdocs - join us!

Couldn't find one so made a quick physics of life list, enjoy! go.bsky.app/EA2VsDN