Arnold Tongue paper published in eLife

How does physics of complex systems apply to actual biology ? This is of course one of the central question explored in our group. In this paper, in collaboration with the Aulehla Group at EMBL Heidelberg, we study the oscillation driving formation in vertebreae, and apply theory of non-linear oscillators to first entrain it, then study its properties. Despite the multiple possible obstacles —we are talking about a collection of cellular oscillators, with slowing frequencies, a moving differentiation front, in an embryonic explant — it works ! One can then not only recover many features from classical theory, but also uncover some surprising properties, very suggestive of specific properties of the embryonic oscillators, which happen to behave a bit like neurons In particular we introduce a new toy model, that we call ERICA (Elliptic Radial Iso Chron with Acceleration), and our results suggest that embryonic oscillators are transitioning towards special bifurcations similar to so-called class I neurons. Another great example of integration between theory and experiments,