Related papers: Effect of adhesion geometry and rigidity on cellul…
Intracellular protein patterns regulate a variety of vital cellular processes such as cell division and motility, which often involve dynamic changes of cell shape. These changes in cell shape may in turn affect the dynamics of…
Bending the edge of a thin elastic material promotes rigidity far from its clamped boundary. However, this curvature-induced rigidity can be overwhelmed by gravity or other external loading, resulting in elastic buckling and large…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
Mechanical forces influence the dynamics of growing tissues. Computer simulations are employed to study the importance of interfacial effects in tissue competition. It was speculated that mechanical pressure determines the competition,…
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…
Cells actively probe and respond to the stiffness of their surroundings. Since mechanosensory cells in connective tissue are surrounded by a disordered network of biopolymers, their in vivo mechanical environment can be extremely…
The mechanics of puncture and soft solid penetration is commonly explored with the assumption of frictionless contact between the needle (penetrator) and the specimen. This leads to the hypothesis of a constant penetration force.…
Cellular solids are known to exhibit size effects, i.e., differences in the apparent effective elastic moduli, when the specimen size becomes comparable to the cell size. The present contribution employs direct numerical simulations (DNS)…
A hallmark of biological tissues, viewed as complex cellular materials, is the active generation of mechanical stresses by cellular processes, such as cell divisions. Each cellular event generates a force dipole that deforms the surrounding…
Adhesion plays an integral role in diverse biological functions ranging from cellular transport to tissue development. Estimation of adhesion strength, therefore, becomes important to gain biophysical insight into these phenomena. In this…
In densely-packed two-dimensional systems of growing cells, such as rod-shaped bacteria, a number of experimental and numerical studies report distinct patterns of nematic orientational order in the presence of confinement. So far, these…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
During animal development and homeostasis, the structure of tissues, including muscles, blood vessels and connective tissues adapts to mechanical strains in the extracellular matrix (ECM). These strains originate from the differential…
Cell membranes interact via anchored receptor and ligand molecules. Central questions on cell adhesion concern the binding affinity of these membrane-anchored molecules, the mechanisms leading to the receptor-ligand domains observed during…
The behaviour of elastic structures undergoing large deformations is the result of the competition between confining conditions, self-avoidance and elasticity. This combination of multiple phenomena creates a geometrical frustration that…
Cells can sense and respond to mechanical signals over relatively long distances across fibrous extracellular matrices. Here, we explore all of the key factors that influence long range force transmission in cell-populated collagen…
Simulations of tethered cells in viscous sub-layers are frequently performed using the Stokes drag force, but without taking into account contributions from surface corrections, lift forces, buoyancy, the Basset force, the cells finite…
We review theoretical results for the adhesion-induced phase behavior of biomembranes. The focus is on models in which the membranes are represented as discretized elastic sheets with embedded adhesion molecules. We present several…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
We investigate the dynamics of a colony of crawling, proliferating cells with a minimal, mechanical cell model. The cells consist of two disks, modelling the cell body and a pseudopod, connected by a finite extensible spring. The cells…