About
Professor Lubensky does theoretical and computational research at the interface between physics and biology, and in particular in the rapidly growing area of systems biology. In the broadest terms, we are interested in understanding what makes living matter different from dead matter: What is special about the interactions between biological molecules or cells that allows living systems to achive their exquisite degree of self-organization in space and time? To answer this question, we build models that try to capture the interactions and feedbacks that are at the root of biological order and fuction in particular systems, and we work closely with experimental groups to design and analyze experiments to test these models. Under this general umbrella, we are pursuing several distinct lines of research, with a particuar focus on pattern formation and morphogenesis in animal development, on the physics of biological clocks and oscillators, and on the precision of growth and size across biological scales.
Exampes of topics of recent interest include:
- Circadian clocks in bacteria and the possible implications of the “molecular synchronization” mechanism driving these clocks for other biological oscillators.
- The role of mechanical forces in shaping tissues during animal development. For example, together with the lab of Yohanns Bellaïche, we are exploring how cells regulate their cytoskeleton to limit deformation when they are subjected to large mechanical stresses.
- What determines variability in the size of living cells. Empirically, across many different cell types from bacteria to humans, cell sizes are observed to fluctuate by of order 10% about their mean. What sets this 10% figure, and, even more basically, is this a large or a small number, i.e. can one conceive of straightforward ways to attain much lower variability, or are there fundamental limits that would make it difficult to do much better than 10%?
Selected Publications
Apical stress fibers enable a scaling between cell mechanical response and area in epithelial tissue, (Jesús M. López-Gay, Hayden Nunley, Meryl Spencer, Florencia di Pietro, Boris Guirao, Floris Bosveld, Olga Markova, Isabelle Gaugue, Stéphane Pelletier, David K. Lubensky, and Yohanns Bellaïche), Science 370, eabb2169 (2020).
Physical limits to sensing material properties, (Farzan Beroz, Di Zhou, Xiaoming Mao, and David K. Lubensky), Nature Communic. 11, 5170 (2020).
The statistics of noisy growth with mechanical feedback in elastic tissues, (Ojan Khatib Damavandi and David K. Lubensky), PNAS 116, 5350 (2019).
Robustness of clocks to input noise, (Michele Monti, David K. Lubensky, and Pieter Rein ten Wolde), Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 078101 (2018).
Vertex stability and topological transitions in vertex models of foams and epithelia, (Meryl A. Spencer, Zahera Jabeen, and David K. Lubensky), Eur. Phys. J. E 40, 2 (2017).
Discrete gene replication events drive coupling between the cell cycle and circadian clocks, (Joris Paijmans, Mark Bosman, Pieter Rein ten Wolde, and David K. Lubensky), PNAS 113, 4063 (2016).
Coupling mechanical deformations and planar cell polarity to create regular patterns in the zebrafish retina, (Guillaume Salbreux, Linda K. Barthel, Pamela A. Raymond, and David K. Lubensky), PLoS Comp. Biol. 8, e1002618 (2012).
A Dynamical Model of Ommatidial Crystal Formation, (David K. Lubensky, Matthew W. Pennington, Boris I. Shraiman, and Nicholas E. Baker), PNAS 108, (2011).
Robust Circadian Clocks from Coupled Protein Modification and Transcription-translation Cycles, (David Zwicker, David K. Lubensky, and Pieter Rein ten Wolde), PNAS 107, 22540, (2010).
Equilibrium-like Behavior in Chemical Reaction Networks Far from Equilibrium, (David K. Lubensky), Phys. Rev. E 81, 060102(R), (2010).
Field(s) of Study
- Theoretical and Computational Biological and Statistical Physics
