Related papers: The flow of forces through cellular materials
In a continuum description of materials, the stress tensor field $\bar{% \bar{\sigma}}$ quantifies the internal forces the neighbouring regions exert on a region of the material. The classical theory of elastic solids assumes that…
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)…
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…
Animal cells use traction forces to sense the mechanics and geometry of their environment. Measuring these traction forces requires a workflow combining cell experiments, image processing and force reconstruction based on elasticity theory.…
Structural cellular materials in nature, such as wood, trabecular bone, corals, and dentin combine complex biological functions with structural roles, such as skeletal support and impact protection1,2. They feature complex structural…
Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…
We present results of a two-scale model of disordered cellular materials where we describe the microstructure in an idealized manner using a beam network model and then make a transition to a Cosserat-type continuum model describing the…
A general procedure to investigate the elastic response and calculate the elastic constants of stressed and unstressed materials through continuum field modeling, particularly the phase field crystal (PFC) models, is presented. It is found…
The measurement of cellular traction forces on soft elastic substrates has become a standard tool for many labs working on mechanobiology. Here we review the basic principles and different variants of this approach. In general, the…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
Mechanically active cells in soft media act as force dipoles. The resulting elastic interactions are long-ranged and favor the formation of strings. We show analytically that due to screening, the effective interaction between strings…
The plastic flow of a foam results from bubble rearrangements. We study their occurrence in experiments where a foam is forced to flow in 2D: around an obstacle; through a narrow hole; or sheared between rotating disks. We describe their…
Our understanding of the elasticity and rheology of disordered materials, such as granular piles, foams, emulsions or dense suspensions relies on improving experimental tools to characterize their behaviour at the particle scale. While 2D…
One of the essential questions in the area of granular matter is, how to obtain macroscopic tensorial quantities like stress and strain from ``microscopic'' quantities like the contact forces in a granular assembly. Different averaging…
Stretching of a protein by a fluid flow is compared to that in a force-clamp apparatus. The comparison is made within a simple topology-based dynamical model of a protein in which the effects of the flow are implemented using Langevin…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
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…
The Young's modulus of a two-dimensional truss-like structure is simulated by using the finite element method. A power-law expression is proposed for the effective Young's modulus of the system. The obtained numerical results are compared…
I study fluid flow at the interface between elastic solids with randomly rough surfaces. I use the contact mechanics model of Persson to take into account the elastic interaction between the solid walls and the Bruggeman effective medium…
Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) is a technique used to determine the tensions that a biological cell conveys to the underlying surface. Typically, TFM requires culturing cells on gels with fluorescent beads, followed by bead displacement…