Related papers: Hysteresis in the cell response to time-dependent …
Substrate-based cell motility is essential for fundamental biological processes, such as tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. Even if a comprehensive understanding of this motility mode remains elusive, progress has been…
Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not completely understood. We consider simplified models for…
Actin networks, acting as an engine pushing against an external load, are fundamentally important to cell motility. A measure of the effectiveness of an engine is the velocity the engine is able to produce at a given force, the…
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…
Cellular migration is crucial for biological processes including embryonic development, immune response, and wound healing. The myosin-clutch model is a framework that describes how cells control migration through the interactions between…
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…
Viscoelasticity is well known to cause significant hysteresis of crack closure and opening when an elastomer is brought in and out of contact with a flat, rigid, adhesive counterface. A separate origin of adhesive hysteresis is small-scale,…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
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…
In this communication, we propose a model to study the non-equilibrium process by which actin stress fibers develop force in contractile cells. The emphasis here is on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which is necessary to address the…
Cellular form and function emerge from complex mechanochemical systems within the cytoplasm. No systematic strategy currently exists to infer large-scale physical properties of a cell from its many molecular components. This is a…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
While resistors with memory, sometimes called memristive elements (such as ReRAM cells), are often studied under conditions of periodic driving, little attention has been paid to the Fourier features of their memory response (hysteresis).…
Adhering cells actively probe the mechanical properties of their environment and use the resulting information to position and orient themselves. We show that a large body of experimental observations can be consistently explained from one…
The existence of a very special ratcheting regime has recently been reported in a granular packing subjected to cyclic loading \cite{alonso04}. In this state, the system accumulates a small permanent deformation after each cycle. After a…
Cell cell and cell matrix adhesions are fundamental in all multicellular organisms. They play a key role in cellular growth, differentiation, pattern formation and migration. Cell-cell adhesion is substantial in the immune response,…
Transition from random to persistent cell motility requires spatiotemporal organization of the cytoskeleton and focal adhesions. The influence of these two structures on cell steering can also be gleaned from trypsin de-adhesion…
Actin filaments, crosslinkers and myosin molecular motors form contractile networks. For instance, the cell cortex is a thin network below the cell membrane ; contraction of the cell cortex allows cells to round up during cell division.…
Cadherin adhesion receptors are fundamental determinants of tissue organization in health and disease. Increasingly, we have come to appreciate that classical cadherins exert their biological actions through active cooperation with the…