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This study presents a unified electrohydraulic framework describing how living cells and tissues generate coupled electric fields, osmotic pressures, and fluid flows through ion transport across biological membranes and epithelial layers. The authors demonstrate that spatially heterogeneous ion pumping can produce long-range electric fields and directed fluid flows simultaneously, and identify a previously undescribed self-propulsion mechanism driven by dipolar osmotic pressure gradients distinct from classical electrophoresis. Additionally, they show that nonlinear electrohydraulic coupling can explain isotropic swelling observed in epithelial organoids, and that feedback between ion transport and electric fields can spontaneously break symmetry to produce dipolar or multipolar field patterns.
Why it matters
Understanding how biological tissues generate and couple electrical and hydraulic fields has direct implications for explaining developmental processes, tissue morphogenesis, and the behavior of organoids used in biomedical research and drug testing. This framework may also inform the design of biomimetic systems and guide therapeutic strategies targeting ion transport in disease contexts such as cancer and cystic fibrosis.
arXiv:2605.22056v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Living cells and tissues can generate complex patterns of electric fields and fluid flows which can play important role in physiology. Both, fields and flows are rooted in ion transport across biological interfaces: cell membranes and epithelial cell layers. Here we develop a unified electrohydraulic framework that combines electric fields, osmotic pressures, and fluid flows, emphasising their couplings. We consider an active, permeable interface that drives electrohydraulic fields in the surrounding bulk. We show that spatially heterogeneous ion transport acts as a distributed current source, generating long-range electric fields, osmotic gradients, and fluid flows. Using this framework, we show that patterns of ion pumping at cell and tissue boundaries can simultaneously produce large-scale electric fields and fluid flows due to electrohydraulic coupling. A key insight is that an external electric field and an internal dipolar pumping pattern can be physically equivalent and can generate the same pattern of ion current and fluid flows. The induced dipolar osmotic pressure can drive self-propulsion through bulk osmotic coupling, with a mobility determined by interfacial permeability and system size, a mechanism distinct from classical electrophoresis or electro-osmosis. We further show that for strong fields a new effect emerges. Nonlinear coupling can lead to isotropic swelling of a hollow ball of cells. This can explain recent experiments on epithelial organoids. Finally, we show that feedback between ion transport and resulting electric fields can drive spontaneous symmetry breaking, generating dipolar or multipolar fields and patterns. Our work highlights the importance of electrohydraulic coupling in the emergence in currents and fields in the biological systems.
Source: Electrohydraulic Fields Generated by Active Transport at Tissue Interfaces