Have you ever wondered why your bones are long in your legs and flat in your skull? Or why salad leaves can be so wrinkly? What determines the shape of living organisms? Do jellyfish have such a beautiful form just to be pretty? Do the diverse shapes encountered in nature have a meaning or an influence on the living organisms interacting with them?
Addressing such questions not only implies investigating how nature is shaped but also how shapes guide nature. The answers are not only interesting to better understand biological processes involving shape changes like bone remodeling, wound healing, plant growth, and tropism but also to come up with new strategies to interfere with such phenomena when needed. For example, to accelerate bone healing with appropriate implant designs, to guide plant growth with appropriate signals, or to modify tissue geometry when catastrophic failure occurs.
Such questions are interdisciplinary by nature. This makes them particularly interesting, but also quite challenging. Mathematicians and physicists like to describe shapes using curvature as a parameter, i.e. the inverse of a radius, but biologists and chemists are not necessarily familiar with this concept. On the other hand, biologists and biochemists are comfortable with descriptions of cellular and molecular processes occurring during the morphogenesis of various organisms, which is not the rule for their colleagues mastering equations.
Introducing EuroCurvoBioNet COST Action
The EuroCurvoBioNet Network, which stands for European Curvature and Biology Network, was launched in September 2023 to allow researchers to learn from each other and join forces to investigate the role of geometry in diverse biological systems. This interdisciplinary research network brings together biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and designers to elucidate the role of geometry in biological systems.
The primary challenge for scientists studying the role of curvature in Biology, Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine, and Sustainable Materials is its fundamentally interdisciplinary nature.
EuroCurvoBioNet now promotes and supports exchanges between more than 110 members from 25 countries. To leverage the wealth of expertise diversity in the structure of the network, Working Groups were organised according to the length scales of interest rather than by disciplines.
In response to the complex challenge, these dedicated Working Groups are investigating key aspects of cellular geometry:
- The geometric structures within cellular organisms, such as cells and bacteria;
- The relationship between individual cells and their surrounding geometry;
- The interactions between cell collectives or biological tissues and their environments.
Additionally, a specialised Working Group is focused on developing scalable descriptions applicable across different biological levels. Education and outreach are also among the network priorities to facilitate knowledge-sharing among members. The last Working Group thus aims to translate the research and raise awareness to the general public through targeted outreach, contacts, and links to artists and designers.
“Frequent online and in-person meetings are crucial for fostering a shared understanding and creating a common language among researchers from diverse disciplines. These interactions help us appreciate the unique challenges and perspectives each field brings to the table,” says Łucja Kowalewska, the Action Vice-chair.
EuroCurvoBioNet aims to provide new resources for researchers of all disciplines interested in the role of curvature in biology. The collected existing knowledge in comprehensive review articles will become a ‘must-read’ for anyone working on the topic.
The Action website will progressively be enriched to become a platform compiling tools and methods that could help researchers analyse and interpret their three-dimensional data acquired on biological samples. Foremost, the Action expects to initiate interdisciplinary collaborations between labs.
In late August, in Warsaw, EuroCurvoBioNet organised the kick-off conference of the Action which was a great opportunity for all participants to contribute to the advancement of this cutting-edge field.
CurvoBio2024 offered a broad and diverse program spanning the length scales so that participants could learn about mountain landscape characterisation and cell membrane shaping in the same lecture hall. The lively discussions both revolved around the various topics tackled in the presentations and brought up ideas to implement in the EuroCurvoBioNet Action.
The beauty of geometry in biological systems was also featured in an image contest won by a physicist exploring the patterns acquired by the guts in the jellyfish.
Jellyfish Canal Network by Stanisław Żukowski from the University of Warsaw & Université Paris Cité won the image contest at CurvoBio2024.
John Dunlop, the Action Chair adds: “The conference CurvoBio2024 was a fantastic event that highlighted the need for such an interdisciplinary network that we have with this COST Action. The broad variety of talks ranged in scale from geographical curvature (scale of mountains and hills) down to the curvature of cell membranes and discussed topics across different kingdoms of life. What held everything in common was the need to combine topics of mathematics, physics, biology, and aesthetic aspects due to the inherent beauty of what we are looking at. Alone the discussions held after talks and in the evenings were inspiring and brought new people together and hopefully will initiate further research in the future.”
Additional information
View the Action webpage
View the Network website: www.curvobio.com
Want to learn more? Join the EuroCurvoBioNet webinars every first Wednesday of the month at 1:30 pm CET dedicated to research, teaching and outreach on curvature in biological systems.
Follow EuroCurvoBioNet on LinkedIn and X @eurocurvobio