Amin Doostmohammadi has received the “2021 Major Advances in Biology Prize” from the French Academy of Sciences

Amin Doostmohammadi receives the Prize for his work on unravelling the nature of forces in cellular tissues, as described in a recent paper published in Nature Materials.

Changes in the way that cells stick to each other and to their surrounding environment are involved in mechanisms essential for tissue and organ formation, as well as in pathological mechanisms such as tumor progression. To understand these changes between the individual and the collective, Amin Doostmohammadi, in collaboration with experimental groups in France, Singapore, and Australia, developed a new model for connecting single cell-level forces to multicellular scale. In doing so, the results revealed the impact of cell adhesion on the dynamics of cellular organization and in particular singularities in the alignment of the cells that are called topological defects.

This multidisciplinary work at the interface between biophysics and cell biology offers a new framework for understanding the self-organization of tissues based on the analogy with nematic liquid crystals and the nature of internal forces.