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  • Open Access

Electrohydraulic fields generated by active transport at tissue interfaces

Amit Singh Vishen*

Ahandeep Manna

Frank Jülicher†

  • *Contact author: amit.singh-vishen@warwick.ac.uk
  • †Contact author: julicher@pks.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 043150 – Published 10 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/lx98-csnd

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, emphasizing 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—They 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 of currents and fields in the biological systems.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 043150– Published 10 November, 2026
  • Received 26 May 2026
  • Accepted 20 October 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by Max Planck Society.

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