Related papers: Substrate rigidity deforms and polarizes active ge…
When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and…
The sticking of a soft polystyrene colloidal particle to a planar glass plate was studied by a microrheological technique using an optical tweezer to trap the particle and a piezoelectric-stage to position the plate and to sinusoidally…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
Multiphase field models have emerged as an important computational tool for understanding biological tissue while resolving single-cell properties. While they have successfully reproduced many experimentally observed behaviors of living…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
Coordinated and cooperative motion of cells is essential for embryonic development, tissue morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer invasion. A predictive understanding of the emergent mechanical behaviors in collective cell motion is…
We consider two minimal models of active fluid droplets that exhibit complex dynamics including steady motion, deformation, rotation and oscillating motion. First we consider a droplet with a concentration of active contractile matter…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…
We reduce a one-dimensional model of an active segment (AS), which is used, for instance, in the description of contraction driven cell motility on tracks, to a zero-dimensional model of an active particle (AP) characterized by two internal…
Fluid droplets can be induced to move over rigid or flexible surfaces under external or body forces. We describe the effect of variations in material properties of a flexible substrate as a mechanism for motion. In this paper, we consider a…
Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
Compressive mechanical stress exceeding a critical value leads to the formation of periodic surface buckling patterns in film-substrate systems. A comprehensive understanding of this buckling phenomenon is desired in applications where the…
The complicated dynamics of the contact line of a moving droplet on a solid substrate often hamper the efficient modeling of microfluidic systems. In particular, the selection of the effective boundary conditions, specifying the contact…
A model of multicellular systems with several types of cells is developed from the phase field model. The model is presented as a set of partial differential equations of the field variables, each of which expresses the shape of one cell.…
The mechanical environment of a substrate plays a key role in influencing the behavior of adherent biological cells. Traditional tunable substrates have limitations as their mechanical properties cannot be dynamically altered in-situ during…
Active force generation by actin-myosin cortex coupled to the cell membrane allows the cell to deform, respond to the environment, and mediate cell motility and division. Several membrane-bound activator proteins move along it and couple to…
Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical…
Eukaryote cells have a flexible shape, which dynamically changes according to the function performed by the cell. One mechanism for deforming the cell membrane into the desired shape is through the expression of curved membrane proteins.…