Conveners
Internal flows in soft tissue tubes: Evo + Devo + Physio
- Sharon Lubkin (North Carolina State University)
Description
A unifying feature of metazoans is the physical necessity of bulk transport systems, most of which can be described as systems of soft tubes. These soft tubes transport secretions by a variety of methods, including passive response to pressure gradients, peristaltic pumping, and other methods. The morphogenesis and evolution of the tubes and the functioning and control of the transport methods that they use involve complex interactions between gene networks, signalling, transport of Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, and fluid-structure interactions.
This minisymposium presents work on a variety of tubular transport systems: from the tunicate heart, to mammalian lymphatics, lung, and salivary glands. We will discuss flow, physiology, mechanical stress, control systems, and evolutionary aspects.
We have developed several models of the physical control of branching morphogenesis in the lung, considering a variety of factors, including transport and mechanics. Simple models can explain complex phenomena, though how reasonable a model initially seems is not necessarily correlated with its ultimate explanatory power. In this talk, we will present a variety of models of branching...
The parotid salivary gland consists of groups of acinar cells all transporting water into a lumen with a complex branched structure. In addition, each acinar cell itself has a complex spatial structure, with heterogenous spatial distributions of the channels that control water transport. The goal of our model is to determine the relationships between structure and function, both at the level...
Understanding lymphatic development is clinically relevant in applications from the viability of embryos, to chronic inflammation, to cancer metastasis. I specifically quantify the branching structure of developing lymphatic vessels and numerically solve for the flow through these vessels. Branching in arterial development is understood to consistently follow Murray’s Law, which states that...
Biologists are interested in functional performance based on complicated mechanical systems to understand how structures may have evolved. Since direct manipulation of these systems in an organism are not always possible, many functional systems are modelled using computational methods, such computational fluid dynamics. These functional systems and their simplified models involve many...