Looping Network Meetings

#69 May 12, 2025

Monday 15:00 (Paris/Warsaw time)

Efe Ilker (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems)

Self-Organized Growth, Branching, and Allometric Scaling of the Planarian Gut

Abstract:
Branched patterns play a fundamental role in organs that optimize exchange surfaces. However, the mechanisms by which these branched patterns grow to the appropriate size, topology, and shape to meet physiological demands remain largely unknown. Interestingly, these biological patterns often resemble physical systems that exhibit branching, such as diffusion-limited aggregation, viscous fingering, and solidification. While these phenomena can inspire biophysical models, there is a need for new models that account for the special aspects of animal development, including growth, degrowth, and regeneration. In this work, we provide a framework combining theory and experiment to study the scaling of branched organs. As a biological model, we focus on the branching morphogenesis of the planarian gut, which is a highly branched organ responsible for the delivery of nutrients. We introduce a theoretical framework in which we consider the dynamics of the interface between organ and surrounding tissue to be controlled by a morphogen and illustrate how a shape instability of this interface can give rise to the self-organized formation and growth of complex branched patterns. Our model can recapitulate the scaling laws of planarian gut morphology with increasing organism size and also opens new directions for understanding allometric scaling laws in various other branching systems in organisms.

Recording