Coming up next
2026-11-05 - 13:30 @ DM1.19 (New Gorleaus)
SLAM Seminar: Irene (Yuting) Li (Hubrecht Institute)
Clock and waves: temporal self-organisation across biological systems
Many biological systems rely on oscillations. Cells progress through the cell cycle during proliferation; in the testis, sperm are produced in cycles, with germ cells maturing in sync with periodic shape changes of the supporting cells. How are such oscillations coordinated and organised across many cells, and what does this coordination achieve? In this talk, I will treat both aforementioned systems as lattices of coupled oscillators, using the Kuramoto model and its extensions to distil their essential ingredients. By varying the strength and asymmetry of the coupling between oscillators, we identify the origin of the travelling waves observed in each system and show how the wave patterns depend on the underlying interactions.