[] | #2 - by Yufei Xiao - Drops and Clumps

It took us eight weeks of journal club to get through this paper, “Multivalent interactions make adherens junction–cytoskeletal linkage robust during morphogenesis.” There were many counterintuitive answers that challenged my assumptions in the discussions, which made me appreciate the ability of experiments and observations to overthrow old stories (One example being how force and response relate). I was attracted to the definition of robustness in biology. Perhaps most unfounded was my immediate association of the word to how strong a person is to the harshness of life coming their way. The second association comes from networks. Robustness is how many nodes you can randomly remove without collapsing all other nodes and edges. Often, networks that have more edges between nodes are more robust. Additionally, there are often feedback loops which regulate for the network. In this paper, however, the removal, regulation, node, and edge all have more specific connotations. The biological

It took us eight weeks of journal club to get through this paper, “Multivalent interactions make adherens junction–cytoskeletal linkage robust during morphogenesis.” There were many counterintuitive answers that challenged my assumptions in the discussions, which made me appreciate the ability of experiments and observations to overthrow old stories (One example being how force and response relate). I was attracted to the definition of robustness in biology. Perhaps most unfounded was my immediate association of the word to how strong a person is to the harshness of life coming their way. The