<< At the end of its first week of development, a striking change occurs in a fruit-fly egg cell. The cell’s internal fluid motion transitions from a disordered mix of small-scale flows to a single vortex that encompasses the entire cell. >>
<< Given the fluid’s incompressibility, those forces can give rise to what the researchers call a "swirling" instability, and the flow switches to a cell-spanning rotation. The threshold of molecular motor activity for the transition depends on the buckling of individual microtubules, which are treated as elastic rods. >>
A Vortex in an Egg Cell. Physics 14, s1. Jan 13, 2021.
David B. Stein, Gabriele De Canio, et al. Swirling Instability of the Microtubule Cytoskeleton. Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 028103. doi: 10.1103/ PhysRevLett.126.028103. Jan 13, 2021.
