Related papers: Reversibility of Red blood Cell deformation
We investigate the geometrical and mechanical properties of adherent cells characterized by a highly anisotropic actin cytoskeleton. Using a combination of theoretical work and experiments on micropillar arrays, we demonstrate that the…
The fate of every eukaryotic cell subtly relies on the exceptional mechanical properties of microtubules. Despite significant efforts, understanding their unusual mechanics remains elusive. One persistent, unresolved mystery is the…
Characterizing the capabilities, criticalities and response to perturbations of genome-scale metabolic networks is a basic problem with important applications. A key question concerns the identification of the potentially most harmful…
Rigidity transitions in simple models of confluent cells have been a powerful organizing principle in understanding the dynamics and mechanics of dense biological tissue. In this work we explore the interplay between geometry and rigidity…
The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
Constrictions in blood vessels and microfluidic devices can dramatically change the spatial distribution of passing cells or particles and are commonly used in biomedical cell sorting applications. However, the three-dimensional nature of…
Red blood cells are highly deformable and present in various shapes. In blood cell disorders, only a subset of all cells is morphologically altered and relevant for the diagnosis. However, manually labeling of all cells is laborious,…
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…
The theory of irreversible thermodynamics for arbitrarily curved lipid membranes is presented here. The coupling between elastic bending and irreversible processes such as intra-membrane lipid flow, intra-membrane phase transitions, and…
(200 words) Oxidation of unsaturated lipids is a fundamental process involved in cell bioenergetics as well as in cell death. Using giant unilamellar vesicles and a chlorin photosensitizer, we asymmetrically oxidized the outer or inner…
Reversibility of state transitions is intensively studied topic in many scientific disciplines over many years. In cell biology, it plays an important role in epigenetic variation of phenotypes, known as phenotypic plasticity. More…
The amount of rippling in graphene sheets is related to the interactions with the substrate or with the suspending structure. Here, we report on an irreversibility in the response to forces that act on suspended graphene sheets. This may…
I consider the microscopic mechanisms by which a particular left-right (L/R) asymmetry is generated at the organism level from the microscopic handedness of cytoskeletal molecules. In light of a fundamental symmetry principle, the typical…
We present experiments on RBCs that flow through microcapillaries under physiological conditions. We show that the RBC clusters form as a subtle imbrication between hydrodynamics interaction and adhesion forces because of plasma proteins.…
All types of blood cells are formed by differentiation from a small self-maintaining population of pluri-potential stem cells in the bone marrow. Despite abundant information on the molecular aspects of division, differentiation, commitment…
The reproduction of a living cell requires a repeatable set of chemical events to be properly coordinated. Such events define a replication cycle, coupling the growth and shape change of the cell membrane with internal metabolic reactions.…
Induced by proteins within the cell membrane or by differential growth, heating, or swelling, spontaneous curvatures can drastically affect the morphology of thin bodies and induce mechanical instabilities. Yet, the interaction of…
The tumbling to tank-treading (TB-TT) transition for red blood cells (RBCs) has been widely investigated, with a main focus on the effects of the viscosity ratio $\lambda$ (i.e., the ratio between the viscosities of the fluids inside and…
Interfaces between stratified epithelia and their supporting stromas commonly exhibit irregular shapes. Undulations are particularly pronounced in dysplastic tissues and typically evolve into long, finger-like protrusions in carcinomas. In…