Related papers: Tensile Forces and Shape Entropy Explain Observed …
Cell-to-cell heterogeneity drives a range of (patho)physiologically important phenomena, such as cell fate and chemotherapeutic resistance. The role of metabolism, and particularly mitochondria, is increasingly being recognised as an…
We prepare static granular beds under gravity in different stationary states by tapping the system with pulsed excitations of controlled amplitude and duration. The macroscopic state---defined by the ensemble of static configurations…
We implement molecular dynamics simulations in canonical ensemble to study the effect of confinement on a $2d$ crystal of point particles interacting with an inverse power law potential proportional to $r^{-12}$ in a narrow channel. This…
The computer-aided folding of biomolecules, particularly RNAs, is one of the most difficult challenges in computational structural biology. RNA tetraloops are fundamental RNA motifs playing key roles in RNA folding and RNA-RNA and…
Neither of the two prevalent theories, namely thermodynamic stability and kinetic stability, provides a comprehensive understanding of protein folding. The thermodynamic theory is misleading because it assumes that free energy is the…
Pressurized elastic shells are ubiquitous in nature and technology, from the outer walls of yeast and bacterial cells to artificial pressure vessels. Indentation measurements simultaneously probe the internal pressure and elastic properties…
We examine the dependence of a thermodynamic potential of a fluid on the geometry of its container. If motion invariance, continuity, and additivity of the potential are fulfilled, only four morphometric measures are needed to describe…
In a wide class of physical systems, diffeomorphisms in the state space leave the amount of entropy produced per unit time inside the bulk of the system unaffected [M. Polettini et al., 12th Joint European Thermodynamics Conference,…
Background: Nuclear pasta, emerging due to the competition between the long-range Coulomb force and the short-range strong force, is believed to be present in astrophysical scenarios, such as neutron stars and core-collapse supernovae. Its…
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
We consider a cellular monolayer, described using a vertex-based model, for which cells form a spatially disordered array of convex polygons that tile the plane. Equilibrium cell configurations are assumed to minimize a global energy…
Recent experiments have elucidated the physical properties of kinetoplasts, which are chain-mail-like structures found in the mitochondria of trypanosome parasites formed from catenated DNA rings. Inspired by these studies, we use Monte…
Understanding the mechanism of nucleation of the stable phase inside the metastable parent phase during a first order phase transition has been a subject of outstanding interest in natural science. The problem becomes even more challenging…
The force network of a granular assembly, defined by the contact network and the corresponding contact forces, carries valuable information about the state of the packing. Simple analysis of these networks based on the distribution of force…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While stress-strain curves for a wide range of temperature can be fit to the functional form predicted by entropic network models, many other…
The homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
A number of factors, such as, cell-cell interactions and self-propulsion of cells driven by cytoskeletal forces determine tissue morphologies and dynamics. To explore the interplay between these factors in controlling the dynamics at the…
Using a popular vertex-based model to describe a spatially disordered planar epithelial monolayer, we examine the relationship between cell shape and mechanical stress at the cell and tissue level. Deriving expressions for stress tensors…
We present extensive Monte Carlo simulations for the thermodynamic and structural properties of a planar bilayer of dipolar hard spheres for a wide range of densities, dipole moments and layer separations. Expressions for the stress and…
The vertex model is widely used to describe the dynamics of epithelial tissues, because of its simplicity and versatility and the direct inclusion of biophysical parameters. Here, it is shown that quite generally, when cells modify their…