Cell Behavior
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 outbreak in Chinas Hubei area in late 2019 has now created a global pandemic that has spread to over 150 countries. In most people, COVID 19 is a respiratory infection that produces fever,…
Amoeboid cell motility is relevant in a wide variety of biomedical applications such as wound healing, cancer metastasis, and embryonic morphogenesis. It is characterized by pronounced changes of the cell shape associated with expansions…
The Notch-Delta signaling pathway mediates cell differentiation implicated in many regulatory processes including spatiotemporal patterning in tissues by promoting alternate cell fates between neighboring cells. At the multicellular level,…
Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…
Cell polarization and directional cell migration can display random, persistent and oscillatory dynamic patterns. However, it is not clear if these polarity patterns can be explained by the same underlying regulatory mechanism. Here, we…
Biological systems across various length and time scales are noisy, including tissues. Why are biological tissues inherently chaotic? Does heterogeneity play a role in determining the physiology and pathology of tissues? How do physical and…
Segregation of different cell types is a crucial process for the pattern formation in tissues, in particular during embryogenesis. Since the involved cell interactions are complex and difficult to measure individually in experiments,…
Microplastics in the marine environment have been paid more and more attention by researchers, and the impact of these substances on marine microorganisms can not be ignored. Studies have shown that PS-COOH Microplastics are harmful to…
To understand cell migration, it is crucial to gain knowledge on how cells exert and integrate forces on/from their environment. A quantity of prime interest for biophysicists interested in cell movements modeling is the intracellular…
Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical…
Wound assessment is a critical aspect of wound treatment, as the healing progress of a wound determines the optimal approach to care. However, the heterogeneity of burn wounds often complicates wound assessment, causing inaccurate wound…
Morphogenesis, tissue regeneration and cancer invasion involve transitions in tissue morphology. These transitions, caused by collective cell migration (CCM), have been interpreted as active wetting/de-wetting transitions. This phenomenon…
In the chemotactic motion of Escherichia coli, the switching of transmembrane chemoreceptors between active and inactive states is one of the most important steps of the signaling pathway. We study the effect of this switching time-scale on…
A fundamental issue in biology is the nature of evolutionary transitions from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Volvocine algae are models for this transition, as they span from the unicellular biflagellate Chlamydomonas to…
We propose a non-local model for contact guidance and steric hindrance depending on a single external cue, namely the extracellular matrix, that affects in a twofold way the polarization and speed of motion of the cells. We start from a…
Tumor cells invade individually or in groups, mediated by mechanical interactions between cells and their surrounding matrix. These multicellular dynamics are reminiscent of leader-follower coordination and epithelial-mesenchymal…
Flocks of birds, schools of fish, mixtures of motors and cytoskeletal filaments, swimming bacteria and driven granular media are systems of interacting motile units that exhibit collective behaviour. These can all be described as active…
Cells rely on the ability to sense and respond to small spatial differences in chemoattractant concentrations for survival. There is growing evidence that this is accomplished by setting the signaling system near the threshold for…
The formation of neuron networks is a process of fundamental importance for understanding the development of the nervous system and for creating biomimetic devices for tissue engineering and neural repair. The basic process that controls…
Atherosclerotic plaques are fatty growths in artery walls that cause heart attacks and strokes. Plaque formation is orchestrated by macrophages that are recruited to the artery wall to consume and remove blood-derived lipids, such as…