Jacob Notbohm
Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing fraction is effectively fixed, the prevailing paradigm…
Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…
In tissue development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, coordinated cell motion arises from active forces produced by the cells. The relationship between force and motion remains unclear, however, because the forces result from a sum of…
We perform cell segmentation on images from experimental studies of confluent, mobile cells in epithelial monolayers and show that these systems possess a broad, positively-skewed shape parameter distribution $P(\mathcal{A})$, where…
Epithelial tissues are driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium by internally generated forces, causing complex patterns of motion. Even when both the forces and motion are measurable, it is not yet possible to relate the two, because the…
In confluent cell monolayers, patterns of cell forces and motion are systematically altered near topological defects in cell shape. In turn, defects have been proposed to alter cell density, extrusion, and invasion, but it remains unclear…
This study investigates the relationship between cell shape and cell-generated stresses in confluent cell layers. Using simultaneous measurements of cell shape orientation and cell-generated contractile forces in MDCK and LP-9 colonies, we…
Cells in an epithelial monolayer coordinate motion with their neighbors giving rise to collectively moving packs of sizes spanning multiple cell diameters. The physical mechanism controlling the pack size, however, remains unclear. A…
Through mechanical forces, biological cells remodel the surrounding collagen network, generating striking deformation patterns. Tethers-tracts of high densification and fiber alignment-form between cells, thinner bands emanate from cell…
Key to collective cell migration is the ability of cells to rearrange their position with respect to their neighbors. Recent theory and experiments demonstrated that cellular rearrangements are facilitated by cell shape, with cells having…
Cell migration is essential for regulating many biological processes in physiological or pathological conditions, including embryonic development and cancer invasion. In vitro and in silico studies suggest that collective cell migration is…
We construct a homogeneous, nonlinear elastic constitutive law, that models aspects of the mechanical behavior of inhomogeneous fibrin networks. Fibers in such networks buckle when in compression. We model this as a loss of stiffness in…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…