Our paper on the mechanical behavior of three-dimensional embryonic tissues is now published in J. Royal Society Interface, and a news story about it is available here!

Dapeng Max Bi presented a poster entitled "Energy barriers govern glassy behavior in tissues", and Lisa Manning spoke on a panel about "Successful Careers in Physics" at the Gordon Research Seminar.

Group member Giuseppe Passucci passed the qualifying exam with flying colors. Congrats, Giuseppe.

Dapeng (Max) Bi, Jorge H. Lopez, Jen M. Schwarz, M. Lisa Manning. Energy barriers govern glassy dynamics in tissues.  http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.3891 

The collective mechanical behavior of biological tissues strongly influences morphogenesis, cancer growth and wound healing. Recent observations demonstrate that confluent tissues exhibit features of glassy dynamics, such as caging behavior and dynamical heterogeneities, although it has remained unclear how single-cell properties govern this behavior. Here we develop numerical and theoretical models, based on the statistics of energy barriers to cell rearrangements, that make testable predictions about cell migration in cell monolayers. In particular, we find a surprising dependence of cell migration rates on a cell's number of nearest neighbors, and we predict a glassy two-time correlation function for cell motion, with a waiting time that increases rapidly as cell activity decreases.

Eva-Maria Schoetz, Marcos Lanio, Jared A. Talbot, M. Lisa Manning. Glassy dynamics in three-dimensional embryonic tissues. http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4454

ML Manning and AJ Liu. Universality of vibrational modes in the boson peak and random matrices : http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.5904