Physico-chemical regulation of living matter across scales

How physical environments regulate lifeforms remains an extensively explored, yet perpetually intriguing question. My PhD research pioneers a new perspective which establishes the physical microenvironment as an active regulator of living matter across scales. Towards this, we have innovated bioengineered 3D culture platforms that mimic the spatial architecture of habitats such as soil, mucus, and tissues. Leveraging these, we have explored how biophysical constraints regulate growth, motility, morphology, and cellular states across scales, viz., demonstrating that 3D confinement acts as a potent selective pressure on bacterial communities; discovering a fundamentally unique mode of physical control over cell cycle progression in budding yeast; establishing how viscoelastic regimes govern transitions in worm motility; characterizing environmental cues which regulate the organization and plasticity of structurally-heterogeneous ovarian cancer spheroids; and identifying that the cellular state is an emergent property resulting from a unique regulatory axis between oxygen signalling and mechanical regimes. Together, our work pioneers generalizable principles describing the physical regulation of biological phenomena across complex 3D microenvironments.