Aktueller Vortrag

15.10.2025: Bernat Corominas-Murtra (Graz): The not-so-straightforward relation between phyiscal time and biological time, HS 02.11, Institut für Biologie, Bereich Zoologie, Universitätsplatz 2, 13:15 Uhr
Clocks are mechanisms that display a (supposedly) periodic internal dynamical behaviour that enables us to measure time. Living beings have plenty of mechanisms that metaphorically ressemble the functioning of a clock, like hormone cycles,  heart beats or metabolic and cell division rates. These mechanisms define, each, a biological time, being the cell division rate among the most commonly accepted representatives. The observed biological time is not totally arbitrary: it must display some alignement to phyiscal time due to selective pressures and fundamental constraints coming from phyiscs and chemistry. What is this relation? In this talk we will revise recent surprising advances in the mapping between biological and physical time in early embrionic development stages of metazoans.