Jeudi 18 décembre 2025 à 11h, salle 357 - IUSTI
Plant growth is a hydromechanical process: cells enlarge by taking up water, while their walls expand and remodel under turgor-driven tension. In multicellular tissues, where cells are mechanically linked, morphogenesis emerges from the combined effects of local growth, shaped by heterogeneous mechanical, physical, and chemical fields that act with varying degrees of nonlocal influence.
To describe this, we developed a physical field theory of plant growth that treats tissue as a poromorphoelastic body—a growing poroelastic medium in which growth stems from pressure-driven deformations and osmotically driven water uptake. In this view, growing regions behave as hydraulic sinks, enabling complex nonlocal interactions such as water competition and growth-induced water-potential gradients. More broadly, this work lays the foundations for a mechanistic, physics-based field theory of plant morphogenesis at different scales, where growth emerges from the interplay of multiple physical fields and biochemical regulation enters through specific physical parameters.