TY - JOUR
T1 - Proliferating active matter
AU - Hallatschek, Oskar
AU - Datta, Sujit S.
AU - Drescher, Knut
AU - Dunkel, Jörn
AU - Elgeti, Jens
AU - Waclaw, Bartek
AU - Wingreen, Ned S.
N1 - Funding Information:
O.H. acknowledges support by a Humboldt Professorship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the NIH under award R01GM115851. S.S.D. acknowledges funding from the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Pew Biomedical Scholars Program and National Science Foundation (NSF) grant DMR-2011750. K.D. was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Consolidator grant TMCG-3_213801. J.D. acknowledges support by the NSF Award DMR-2214021 and the Sloan Foundation grant G-2021-16758. J.E. was supported by the Helmholtz ERC Recognition Award grant number ERC-RA-0044 and the Jülich Innovation Fund. B.W. acknowledges funding under Dioscuri, a programme initiated by the Max Planck Society, jointly managed with the National Science Centre in Poland, and mutually funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (UMO-2019/02/H/NZ6/00003). N.S.W. acknowledges support by the NSF, through the Center for the Physics of Biological Function (PHY-1734030); National Institutes of Health ( www.nih.gov ) grant R01 GM082938.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - The fascinating patterns of collective motion created by autonomously driven particles have fuelled active-matter research for over two decades. So far, theoretical active-matter research has often focused on systems with a fixed number of particles. This constraint imposes strict limitations on what behaviours can and cannot emerge. However, a hallmark of life is the breaking of local cell number conservation by replication and death. Birth and death processes must be taken into account, for example, to predict the growth and evolution of a microbial biofilm, the expansion of a tumour, or the development from a fertilized egg into an embryo and beyond. In this Perspective, we argue that unique features emerge in these systems because proliferation represents a distinct form of activity: not only do the proliferating entities consume and dissipate energy, they also inject biomass and degrees of freedom capable of further self-proliferation, leading to myriad dynamic scenarios. Despite this complexity, a growing number of studies document common collective phenomena in various proliferating soft-matter systems. This generality leads us to propose proliferation as another direction of active-matter physics, worthy of a dedicated search for new dynamical universality classes. Conceptual challenges abound, from identifying control parameters and understanding large fluctuations and nonlinear feedback mechanisms to exploring the dynamics and limits of information flow in self-replicating systems. We believe that, by extending the rich conceptual framework developed for conventional active matter to proliferating active matter, researchers can have a profound impact on quantitative biology and reveal fascinating emergent physics along the way.
AB - The fascinating patterns of collective motion created by autonomously driven particles have fuelled active-matter research for over two decades. So far, theoretical active-matter research has often focused on systems with a fixed number of particles. This constraint imposes strict limitations on what behaviours can and cannot emerge. However, a hallmark of life is the breaking of local cell number conservation by replication and death. Birth and death processes must be taken into account, for example, to predict the growth and evolution of a microbial biofilm, the expansion of a tumour, or the development from a fertilized egg into an embryo and beyond. In this Perspective, we argue that unique features emerge in these systems because proliferation represents a distinct form of activity: not only do the proliferating entities consume and dissipate energy, they also inject biomass and degrees of freedom capable of further self-proliferation, leading to myriad dynamic scenarios. Despite this complexity, a growing number of studies document common collective phenomena in various proliferating soft-matter systems. This generality leads us to propose proliferation as another direction of active-matter physics, worthy of a dedicated search for new dynamical universality classes. Conceptual challenges abound, from identifying control parameters and understanding large fluctuations and nonlinear feedback mechanisms to exploring the dynamics and limits of information flow in self-replicating systems. We believe that, by extending the rich conceptual framework developed for conventional active matter to proliferating active matter, researchers can have a profound impact on quantitative biology and reveal fascinating emergent physics along the way.
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U2 - 10.1038/s42254-023-00593-0
DO - 10.1038/s42254-023-00593-0
M3 - Review article
C2 - 37360681
AN - SCOPUS:85160791347
SN - 2522-5820
JO - Nature Reviews Physics
JF - Nature Reviews Physics
ER -