Our paper on topological turbulence on the membrane of starfish oocytes is out, and it made the cover of Nature Physics!
By performing a biochemical manipulation, we observed dynamically evolving spiral waves on the membrane of a starfish oocyte. The spiral waves are oscillatory on a point in time, and can be expressed as a ‘phase’, just like the phase of a sine or a cosine wave. While the phases of nearby points vary smoothly in space almost everywhere, they are discontinuous at the centers of spirals. These are called ‘topological defects,’ because the sum of phases encircling this point add up to a non-zero value. Topological defects are observed in many systems such as in two-dimensional materials and superfluids, but how they behave in active matter systems such as in a cell was previously unknown. By tracking the trajectories of these defects, we were able to uncover the pairwise interactions, as well as creation and annihilation dynamics. The results yielded results similar to those in two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates.
Read our paper here.
Our paper generated a lot of media attention. You can read some of the coverage here, here, and here. The image/video of the spiral waves was taken by me!
Melis Tekant 