Biological hypercrystals

Abstract

The notion of biological hypercrystal may be regarded as a step toward a broader crystal notion. In this contribution I consider the geometry of cell patterns in tissues, described in terms of Voronoi tessellations and cut-and-project techniques. In this way, we realize that (1) Voronoi tessellations, early used in the description of atomic and molecular building blocks distributions in QCs, can be extended to describe the geometry of cell arrangements in tissues of biological interest, and (2) the recourse to higher dimensional spaces can be fruitfully exploited to describe complex ordered designs in biological systems.