A Physicochemical Theory of Tip Growth

Pierre Pelcé was born in Poitiers (France) on 4 June 1959. He was teached in the Paris region, before to become a student in Physics at Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris in the beginning of 1980. He begun his scientific career as a CNRS researcher in Marseille (France), working on out of equilibrium systems like flame fronts, more generally chemical fronts and cristalline dendrite morphologies. He then spent one year in the James Franck institute of Chicago in 1986, where he begun to think to possible applications of the dynamics of non living matter to morphogenesis of unicellular algae, fungal cells and neurons. Then he became director of research in CNRS in the Institut de Recherches sur les Phénomènes Hors Equilibre (IRPHE) in Marseille in 1991, where he realized many scientific works on morphogenesis, in teaching collaboration with Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon and fruitful research collaboration with the Neurocybernetic laboratory of Marseille. He is author of Theory of growth and form (2000), which appears as a prelude to a Physicochemical theory of Tip Growth presented in this book.

• 1. Introduction2. Constituents3. Simple laws4. Instabilities5. Geometric models6. Apical growth7. The neuronal tree8. Epilogue