Not just flocking: “Active matter” studies aim to understand wound healing, metastasis

Penguins huddle, wounds heal, mosh pits writhe. Bring together a collection of self-propelled individuals, and you get “active matter”— collective behavior that produces unusual patterns and drives many of the processes important to life. Once, physicists studied non-equilibrium behavior and phase transitions by supplying energy to a system and observing how it was transduced from large to small scales. Today Cristina Marchetti and others, extending an area of physics theory that began in 1995 with bird flocking, study systems where the energy of individuals leads to large-scale organization. They are making progress in understanding the mechanical processes that drive cell motion and underlie phenomena from wound healing to metastasis.

For supplemental information about this New Horizons in Science briefing, see the CASW website