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Diffusion-driven patterns appear on curved surfaces in many settings, initiated by unstable modes of an underlying Laplacian operator. On a flat surface or perfect sphere, the patterns are degenerate, reflecting translational/rotational…
We measure different contributions to entropy production in a living functional epithelial tissue. We do this by extracting the functional dynamics of development while at the same time quantifying fluctuations. Using the translucent…
During the development of an organism, cells must coordinate and organize to generate the correct shape, structure, and spatial patterns of tissues and organs, a process known as morphogenesis. The morphogenesis of embryonic tissues is…
Clathrin-mediated endocytosis is the main pathway used by eukaryotic cells to take up extracellular material, but the dominant physical mechanisms driving this process are still elusive. Recently several high-resolution imaging techniques…
Cells crawling through tissues migrate inside a complex fibrous environment called the extracellular matrix (ECM), which provides signals regulating motility. Here we investigate one such well-known pathway, involving mutually antagonistic…
In clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), clathrin and various adaptor proteins coat a patch of the plasma membrane, which is reshaped to form a budded vesicle. Experimental studies have demonstrated that elevated membrane tension can inhibit…
Studying shape changing thick surfaces induced by differential growth helps us understand morphogenesis in biology and offers opportunities for device design. While ideal 2D differential growth maps have been well studied for both isotropic…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
The alignment of fibers and cells in living tissues affect their mechanical properties and functionality. In this context, one can draw an analogy between tissues and nematic liquid crystal elastomers. We explore this analogy by growing…
During epithelial wound healing, cell morphology near the healed wound and the healing rate vary strongly among different developmental stages even for a single species like \textit{Drosophila}. We develop deformable particle (DP) model…
With a novel 3D discrete-element method specially developed with adhesive contact mechanics, random loose packings of uniform spherical micron-sized particles are fully investigated. The results show that large velocity, large size or weak…
Equilibrium adsorption of disk-like particles on patterned adhesive surfaces is studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The surface is represented as a two-dimensional plane with circular adhesive domains arranged either regularly or…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Eukaryotic cell motility involves a complex network of interactions between biochemical components and mechanical processes. The cell employs this network to polarize and induce shape changes that give rise to membrane protrusions and…
We study the dynamics and patterning of polar contractile filaments on the surface of a cylindrical cell using active hydrodynamic equations that incorporate couplings between curvature and filament orientation. Cables and rings…
Lipid structures exhibit complex and highly dynamic lateral structure; and changes in lipid density and fluidity are believed to play an essential role in membrane targeting and function. The dynamic structure of liquids on the molecular…
Constancy of life vitally depends on the internalization of particles through biomembranes. Of particular interest, cellular uptake, including phagocytosis, receptor-mediated endocytosis, and membrane fusion, critically depends on the…
In this article, we propose a general framework to study the dynamics and topology of cellular networks that capture the geometry of cell packings in two-dimensional tissues. Such epithelia undergo large-scale deformation during…
We use an elastic model to explore faceting of solid-wall vesicles with elastic heterogeneities. We show that faceting occurs in regions where the vesicle wall is softer, such as areas of reduced wall thicknesses or concentrated in…
We use a coarse grained molecular model of supported lipid bilayers to study the formation of adhesion domains. We find that this process is a first order phase transition, triggered by a combination of pairwise short range attractive…