Living Smectics are sensitive to boundary Elasticity

‘Living Smectics’ are being studied by a Physics PhD student, Stephanie Majkut, with Andrea Liu helping in theory.

• Elastic boundary conditions  affect the Order and Organization of the living cytoskeleton. 
• While the effect of boundary geometries on LC order have been widely studied for decades, the elasticity of the boundary has not been examined.  
• Living LCs have been the subject of recent theories, and now have been extended to ‘smectic like’ Order in muscle cells.
• Equally important is the material inspiration such systems provide for synthetic LCs smectics, ‘active’ or ‘dead’, interacting with soft boundaries.