Are homeostatic states stable? Dynamical stability in morphoelasticity

Abstract: Biological growth is often driven by mechanical cues, such as changes in external pressure or tensile loading. Moreover, it is well known that many living tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal stress, called the mechanical homeostasis. The tissue-level feedback mechanism by which changes of the local mechanical stresses affect growth is called a growth law within the theory of morphoelasticity, a theory for understanding the coupling between mechanics and geometry in growing and evolving biological materials. The goal of this article is to develop mathematical techniques to analyze growth laws and to explore issues of heterogeneity and growth stability. We discuss the growth dynamics of tubular structures, which are very common in biology (e.g. arteries, plant stems, airways) and model the homeostasis-driven growth dynamics of tubes which produces spatially inhomogeneous residual stress. We show that the stability of the homeostatic state depends nontrivially on the anisotropy of the growth response. The key role of anisotropy may provide a foundation for experimental testing of homeostasis-driven growth laws.