Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained (opens a new tab) in the Philosophical Magazine that these wine “tears” or “legs” result from the difference in surface tension between alcohol and water. “This fact affords an explanation of several very curious motions,” Thomson wrote. Little did he realize that the same effect, later named the Marangoni effect, might also shape how embryos develop.
In March, a group of biophysicists in France reported (opens a new tab) that the Marangoni effect is responsible for the pivotal moment when a homogeneous blob of cells elongates and develops a head-and-tail axis — the first defining features of the organism it will become.
The finding is part of a trend that defies the norm in biology. Typically, biologists try to characterize growth, development and other biological processes as the result of chemical cues triggered by genetic instructions. But that picture has often seemed incomplete. Researchers now increasingly appreciate the role of mechanical forces in biology: forces that push and pull tissues in response to their material properties, steering growth and development in ways that genes cannot.
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