Related papers: Effect of adhesion geometry and rigidity on cellul…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
The positioning of new cellular walls during cell division plays a key role in shaping plant tissue organization. The influence of cell geometry on the positioning of division planes has been previously captured into various geometrical…
The directed migration of cells toward stiffer substrate regions or durotaxis is relevant to tissue development and tumor progression. Here, we introduce a phenomenological model for single cell durotaxis that incorporates both elastic…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
Interactions between crawling cells, which are essential for many biological processes, can be quantified by measuring cell-cell collisions. Conventionally, experiments of cell-cell collisions are conducted on two-dimensional flat…
Mechanical coupling between a cell and substrate relies on focal adhesions, clusters of adhesion proteins linking stress fibers (bundles of actin proteins) inside the cell with surrounding tissue. Focal adhesions have been demonstrated to…
The mechanisms driving the collective movement of cells remain poorly understood. To contribute toward resolving this mystery, a model was formulated to theoretically explore the possible functions of polarized cell-cell adhesion in…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the mechanical relaxation of cells within a curved epithelial tissue layer represented by an arbitrary curve in two-dimensional space. This model generalises previous one-dimensional models…
In biological systems, the growth of cells, tissues, and organs is influenced by mechanical cues. Locally, cell growth leads to a mechanically heterogeneous environment as cells pull and push their neighbors in a cell network. Despite this…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
Living cells establish long-range orientational order through collective alignment, giving rise to topological defects whose functional relevance is increasingly recognized in tissue organization and morphogenesis. Engineered topographical…
In the absence of environmental cues, a migrating cell performs an isotropic random motion. Recently, the breaking of this isotropy has been observed when cells move in the presence of asymmetric adhesive patterns. However, up to now the…
Cell shape is determined by a balance of intrinsic properties of the cell as well as its mechanochemical environment. Inhomogeneous shape changes underly many morphogenetic events and involve spatial gradients in active cellular forces…
We extend the live-cell motility Filament Based Lamellipodium Model to incorporate the forces exerted on the lamellipodium of the cells due to cell-cell collision and cadherin induced cell-cell adhesion. We take into account the nature of…
The measurement of cellular traction forces on soft elastic substrates has become a standard tool for many labs working on mechanobiology. Here we review the basic principles and different variants of this approach. In general, the…
Crawling cell motility is vital to many biological processes such as wound healing and the immune response. Using a minimal model we investigate the effects of patterned substrate adhesiveness and biophysical cell parameters on the…
The organization of cells within tissues plays a vital role in various biological processes, including development and morphogenesis. As a result, understanding how cells self-organize in tissues has been an active area of research. In our…
Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…