A mechanochemical model recapitulates distinct vertebrate gastrulation modes.

During vertebrate gastrulation, an embryo transforms from a layer of epithelial cells into a multilayered gastrula. This process requires the coordinated movements of hundreds to tens of thousands of cells, depending on the organism. In the chick embryo, patterns of actomyosin cables spanning several cells drive coordinated tissue flows. Here, we derive a minimal theoretical framework that couples actomyosin activity to global tissue flows. Our model predicts the onset and development of gastrulation flows in normal and experimentally perturbed chick embryos, mimicking different gastrulation modes as an active stress instability. Varying initial conditions and a parameter associated with active cell ingression, our model recapitulates distinct vertebrate gastrulation morphologies, consistent with recently published experiments in the chick embryo. Altogether, our results show how changes in the patterning of critical cell behaviors associated with different force-generating mechanisms contribute to distinct vertebrate gastrulation modes via a self-organizing mechanochemical process.

Fluctuation-induced force in homogeneous isotropic turbulence.

Understanding force generation in nonequilibrium systems is a notable challenge in statistical physics. We uncover a fluctuation-induced force between two plates immersed in homogeneous isotropic turbulence using direct numerical simulations. The force is a nonmonotonic function of plate separation. The mechanism of force generation reveals an intriguing analogy with fluctuation-induced forces: In a fluid, energy and vorticity are localized in regions of defined length scales. When varying the distance between the plates, we exclude energy structures modifying the overall pressure on the plates. At intermediate plate distances, the intense vorticity structures (worms) are forced to interact in close vicinity between the plates. This interaction affects the pressure in the slit and the force between the plates. The combination of these two effects causes a nonmonotonic attractive force with a complex Reynolds number dependence. Our study sheds light on how length scale-dependent distributions of energy and high-intensity vortex structures determine Casimir forces.

Growth dynamics of microbubbles on microcavity arrays by solvent exchange: Experiments and numerical simulations.

Solvent exchange is a flow process to induce a transient oversaturation for forming nanobubbles or nanodroplets on solid surfaces by displacing the solution of gases or droplet liquids with a controlled flow of a poor solvent. In this work, we experimentally and numerically investigate the effect of the flow rate and other control parameters on the formation of microbubbles on hydrophobic cavity arrays during the solvent exchange process. We find that the growth rate, location, and number density of microbubbles are closely related to flow rate, solvent concentration, cavity distance, and spatial arrangement. Higher growth rates and number densities of the bubbles were obtained for faster solvent exchange flow rates. The competition of neighbouring growing bubbles for dissolved gas is greatly alleviated when the inter-cavity distance is increased from 13 µm to 40 µm. The effects of the flow rate and the cavity spacing on the bubble growth are in agreement with the observations from our three-dimensional numerical simulations. The findings reported in this work provide important insight into the formation of multiple interacting surface microbubbles under various flow conditions. The understanding may be extended to a smaller scale for the growth of surface nanobubbles during solvent exchange, which is much harder to visualize in experiments.

Flow-induced dissolution of femtoliter surface droplet arrays.

The dissolution of liquid nanodroplets is a crucial step in many applied processes, such as separation and dispersion in the food industry, crystal formation of pharmaceutical products, concentrating and analysis in medical diagnosis, and drug delivery in aerosols. In this work, using both experiments and numerical simulations, we quantitatively study the dissolution dynamics of femtoliter surface droplets in a highly ordered array under a uniform flow. Our results show that the dissolution of femtoliter droplets strongly depends on their spatial positions relative to the flow direction, drop-to-drop spacing in the array, and the imposed flow rate. In some particular cases, the droplet at the edge of the array can dissolve about 30% faster than the ones located near the centre. The dissolution rate of the droplet increases by 60% as the inter-droplet spacing is increased from 2.5 µm to 20 µm. Moreover, the droplets close to the front of the flow commence to shrink earlier than those droplets in the center of the array. The average dissolution rate is faster for the faster flow. As a result, the dissolution time (Ti) decreases with the Reynolds number (Re) of the flow as Ti ∝ Re-3/4. The experimental results are in good agreement with the numerical simulations where the advection-diffusion equation for the concentration field is solved and the concentration gradient on the surface of the drop is computed. The findings suggest potential approaches to manipulate nanodroplet sizes in droplet arrays simply by dissolution controlled by an external flow. The obtained droplets with varying curvatures may serve as templates for generating multifocal microlenses in one array.