Below you will find a quick description of the current scientific projects I am working on.
Mechaverse
- Collaborators: Julien Derr, Manuel Petit, Gonzalo Rivella.
- Funding: Inria ADT
Boundary Value Problems (BVP) and Initial Boundary Value Problems (IBVP) are ubiquitous in the study of morphogenesis. Since its first release, the BVPy library provides tools to address such problems in the Finite Element Method paradigm. The users of the library have raised a number of limitations (e.g. impossibility to consider dynamical meshes, abscence of tools to design 3D cellularized domain, compatibility of the library with the newest versions of its main dependence - FEniCS-X). The goal of the project is to address these limitations and provide the BVPy community with a better, state-of-the-art user experience.
Discotik
- Collaborator: Elsa Gascon, Guillaume Cerutti, Chao Huang.
- Funding: Inria AEx & IXXI
The next frontier in developmental system biology lies between discrete and continuous representations of multicellular structures. The aim of the discotik project is to develop a new formalization, based on discrete exterior calculus, that could natively encompass both. Expressing morphomechanical laws in such a framework would unravel the geometrical cues that cells can extract from tissular mechanical stresses.
The library Dxtr has been developed in the context of this project.
Root mechanics
- Collaborators: Marie-Cecile Caillaud, Elsa Gascon.
When building an organ, adjacent cells coordinate to form topologically stable junctions by integrating a process that guides the cell division site close to an adjacent tricellular mechano-sensitive signaling pathways. Positioning the newly formed tricellular junction in walled multicellular organisms is critical, as cells cannot migrate. In this project, developped in close collaboration with Marie-Cecile Caillaud — a biologist from our hosting lab — we explore to what extend mechanical stress within cell walls can act as a lankmark preventing the formation of "fourway" junctions when newly formed walls connect to existing ones. To that end, we are developing FE-based simulations, using the BVPy library, to compute stress distributions in structures either inspired or directly extracted from confocal aquisitions.
Seed growth
- Collaborators: Benoit Landrein, Elsa Gascon.
Organ size and shape depend on complex biochemical and mechanical interactions between cells and tissues. In collaboration with Benoit Landrein — a biologist from the RDP Lab — we investigate the regulation of seed size and shape by mechanical interactions between two compartments: the endosperm and the seed coat. By combining experiments with theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we tested a mechanosensitive incoherent feedforward loop (ms-IFFL) hypothesis in which pressure-induced stresses play two antagonistic roles; directly driving seed growth, but indirectly inhibiting it through mechanosensitive stiffening of the seed coat. We showed that our ms-IFFL model can recapitulate wild type growth patterns and explain the counter-intuitive small seed phenotype of the haiku2 mutant. Our work further revealed that the developmental regulation of endosperm pressure is needed to prevent a precocious reduction of seed growth rate induced by force-dependent seed coat stiffening.