The people behind the papers – Yonit Maroudas-Sacks and Marko Popović

During Hydra regeneration, supracellular actomyosin fibres are disoriented at two distinct foci of the regenerating tissue. These sites of nematic topological defects eventually form the new head and foot of the regenerated animal. In a new study, Yonit Maroudas-Sacks, Marko Popović, Kinneret Keren and colleagues propose a positive-feedback loop that incorporates fibre organisation, tissue strain and morphogen gradients to promote head organiser formation. To find out more about the work, we caught up with first author Yonit Maroudas-Sacks and co-corresponding author Marko Popović, Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Germany.