title: Mechanical signaling via nonlinear wavefront propagation in a mechanically excitable medium.
abstract: Models that invoke nonlinear wavefront propagation in a chemically excitable medium are rife in the biological literature. Indeed, the idea that wavefront propagation can serve as a signaling mechanism has often been invoked to explain synchronization of developmental processes. In this paper we suggest a kind of signaling based not on diffusion of a chemical species but on the propagation of mechanical stress. We construct a theoretical approach to describe mechanical signaling as a nonlinear wavefront propagation problem and study its dependence on key variables such as the effective elasticity and damping of the medium.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA and Department of Bionanoscience, Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Timon
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Idema
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
authors.forename: Andrea J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D004058:Diffusion; D004330:Drosophila / Q000196:embryology / Q000502:physiology; D055119:Elastic Modulus; D008954:Models, Biological; D009038:Motion; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D013314:Stress, Mechanical