Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting| Aussois 2019

Biology and Physics Confront Cell-Cell Adhesion

Monday Speaker Abstracts

ADHESION AND STICKINESS OF SOFT MATTER Costantino Creton 1,2 ; 1 PSL University, Paris, France 2 ESPCI Paris, Laboratoire SIMM, Paris, France One of the reasons to hold this workshop is the cross-fertilization of ideas between the community interested in adhesion in the life sciences and the soft matter community interested in adhesion of soft materials. Our group has been working for the last twenty years on a comprehensive description of what makes materials sticky. The key concept that we are going to address here is the coupling between the actual chemical/physical interactions that occur at the interface, and the deformability of the environment. Although these ideas have been developed with experiments on macroscopic polymer-based adhesives, they are broadly applicable at all scales. In particular we are going to show how short range viscous forces and long range elastic forces couple and the crucial role played by strain stiffening in the transmission of forces in materials. The other important concept coming from macroscopic mechanics is the spatial (and often temporal) heterogeneity of stresses due to long range elastic forces, which leads to localized failure as opposed to flow. We hope to start the discussion and point out some analogies with adhesion in life sciences. OVERVIEW OF THE BIOPHYSICAL ASPECTS OF CELL-CELL ADHESION Virgile Viasnoff National University of Singapore, Singapore In this talk I will summarize some of the key challenges that have to be resolved to understand cell-cell adhesion, mediated by adherens junction, from a biophysical point of view. I will bridge these aspects with other problems in soft matter. Lastly, I will highlight how the approaches we developed lately in the lab can help dissect the contribution of the different biophysical parameters driving cell-cell contact in the case of suspended doublets and 2-celll lumens.

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