Abstract
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic 1,2 and bacterial 3,4 active matter. Whether persistent crystalline order can emerge in groups of autonomously developing multicellular organisms is currently unknown. Here we show that swimming starfish embryos spontaneously assemble into chiral crystals that span thousands of spinning organisms and persist for tens of hours. Combining experiments, theory and simulations, we demonstrate that the formation, dynamics and dissolution of these living crystals are controlled by the hydrodynamic properties and the natural development of embryos. Remarkably, living chiral crystals exhibit self-sustained chiral oscillations as well as various unconventional deformation response behaviours recently predicted for odd elastic materials 5,6. Our results provide direct experimental evidence for how non-reciprocal interactions between autonomous multicellular components may facilitate non-equilibrium phases of chiral active matter.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 287-293 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Nature |
| Volume | 607 |
| Early online date | 13 Jul 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 14 Jul 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank C. Scheibner, W. Irvine, N. Wingreen, J. Liu, Y.-C. Chao and R. E. Goldstein for valuable discussions. This research was supported by a Sloan Foundation Grant (G-2021-16758) to N.F. and J.D., and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to N.F. T.H.T. acknowledges support from the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard (award number 1764269) and Harvard Quantitative Biology Initiative as an NSF-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow. T.H.T. acknowledges support from the Center for Systems Biology Dresden as ELBE Postdoctoral Fellow. A.M. acknowledges support from a Longterm Fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization (ALTF 528-2019) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Project 431144836). Y.C. acknowledges support from MIT Department of Physics Curtis Marble Fellowship. P.J.F. and S.G. acknowledge support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as Physics of Living Systems Fellows through grant no. GBMF4513. J.D. was supported by the Robert E. Collins Distinguished Scholarship fund. N.F., J.D. and S.G. are grateful to the KITP programme ACTIVE20: Symmetry, Thermodynamics and Topology in Active Matter, supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. NSF PHY-1748958. We thank the MIT SuperCloud for providing access to its HPC resources.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.