Andersen, B.H., Safara, F.M.R., Grudtsyna, V. et al. (5 more authors) (2025) Evidence of universal conformal invariance in living biological matter. Nature Physics. ISSN 1745-2473
Abstract
The emergent dynamics of collective cellular movement are typically thought to depend on how cells interact with one another and the mechanisms used to drive motility, both of which exhibit remarkable diversity across different biological systems. Here we report experimental evidence of a universal feature in the patterns of flow that spontaneously emerge in groups of collectively moving cells. Specifically, we demonstrate that the flows generated by collectively moving dog kidney cells, human breast cancer cells and two different strains of pathogenic bacteria exhibit robust conformal invariance. We also show that the precise form of invariance in all four systems is described by the Schramm–Loewner evolution—a family of planar curves defined by a single parameter—and belongs to the percolation universality class. The presence of universal conformal invariance reveals that the macroscopic features of living biological matter exhibit universal translational, rotational and scale symmetries that are independent of the microscopic properties of its constituents. Our results show that flow patterns generated by different systems are highly conserved and that biological systems can be used to experimentally test predictions from the theories for conformally invariant structures.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Biological physics; Fluid dynamics; Phase transitions and critical phenomena |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BIOTECHNOLOGY AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES RESEARCH COUNCIL BB/R018383/1 HUMAN FRONTIER SCIENCE PROGRAM RGY0080/2021 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 28 Jan 2025 16:52 |
Last Modified: | 14 Mar 2025 12:33 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Nature Research |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41567-025-02791-2 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:222182 |