Talk 16.04.2018

Speaker: Ramin Golestanian
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen

Title: Making Living Matter from the bottom up

Abstract:
There are many ways to study life, and one that is particularly appealing to physicists is regarding it
as self-organized active soft matter that is away from equilibrium "just the right way". In this
Colloquium, I will discuss this notion, and provide a number of examples of how we can begin to put
together simple systems - from basic ingredients that we fully understand - that would exhibit the
kind of active behaviour we find in living systems. I will address the question of stability of a living
system made of active components and propose a fundamentally new mechanism in which a
competition between chemical signalling and cell division can determine the homeostatic conditions
at the systemic level.