Marine Luciano

Post Doctoral Researcher

Multi-scale curvature is a unique feature of epithelia. How the curvature of tissues or generation of curvature induces changes in the organization of cells is still not well understood. During morphogenesis, the dynamics of curvature generation may impact the organization of cells in non-intuitive ways, leading to fully grown tissues. While details of the organization of tissues in real growing embryos or regenerating tissues are difficult to assess, new in vitro substrates that can dynamically change shape can help understand these complex issues.

My post-doctoral project aims at inducing rapidly multi-scale curvature to a flat grown epithelium and assess the changes to cell organization. For this, I aim at combining the roll technique developed by Caterina Tomba in the lab, and the wavy substrate technology that I developed during my PhD (Luciano et al. Nat Phys 2021). With this, I hope to form rolls with inside wrinkles, similar to villi in intestines.

Before that, I was a PhD student with Sylvain Gabriele in University of Mons, Belgium, where I showed that epithelia grown on sinusoidal substrates tend to flatten their surface in order to short smoothen short-range curvature of the substrate (Luciano et al. Nat Phys 2021).