Related papers: The flow of forces through cellular materials
During growth, tissue expands and deforms. Given its elastic properties, stresses emerge in an expanding and deforming tissue. Cell rearrangements can dissipate these stresses and numerous experiments confirm the viscoelastic properties of…
The effect of disorder in the energetic heights and in the physical locations of fence barriers encountered by transmembrane molecules such as proteins and lipids in their motion in cell membranes is studied theoretically. The investigation…
We use a continuous mesoscopic model to address the yielding properties of plastic composites, formed by a host material and inclusions with different elastic and/or plastic properties. We investigate the flow properties of the composed…
Filamentous polymer networks govern the mechanical properties of many biological materials. Force distributions within these networks are typically highly inhomogeneous and, although the importance of force distributions for structural…
The accurate determination of the elastic properties is non-trivial for metallic foils. The measured elastic modulus is often described in literature as significantly smaller than the respective modulus of the bulk counterparts. This paper…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
For the first time the phenomenon of cellular structure coarsening are consistently analysed from the positions of kinetic, hydrodynamic and stochastodynamic theories of nonequilibrium statistical systems. Thereby micro-, meso- and…
The behaviour of elastic structures undergoing large deformations is the result of the competition between confining conditions, self-avoidance and elasticity. This combination of multiple phenomena creates a geometrical frustration that…
Understanding how biomechanical reorganization governs key biological processes, such as morphogenesis and development, requires predictive insights into stress distributions and cellular behavior. While traditional approaches focused on…
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…
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…
To investigate the link between discrete, small-scale and continuous, large scale mechanical properties of a foam, we observe its two-dimensional flow in a channel, around an elliptical obstacle. We measure the drag, lift and torque acting…
Asymmetric partition of fate determinants during cell division is a hallmark of cell differentiation. Recent work suggested that such a mechanism is hijacked by cancer cells to increase both their phenotypic heterogeneity and plasticity and…
How cells move through the three-dimensional extracellular matrix (ECM) is of increasing interest in attempts to understand important biological processes such as cancer metastasis. Just as in motion on flat surfaces, it is expected that…
The importance of mesoscale fluctuations in flowing amorphous materials is widely accepted, without a clear understanding of their role. We propose a mean-field elastoplastic model that admits both stress and strain-rate fluctuations, and…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
We construct a homogeneous, nonlinear elastic constitutive law, that models aspects of the mechanical behavior of inhomogeneous fibrin networks. Fibers in such networks buckle when in compression. We model this as a loss of stiffness in…
Amorphous materials exhibit complex material proprteties with strongly nonlinear behaviors. Below a yield stress they behave as plastic solids, while they start to yield above a critical stress $\Sigma_c$. A key quantity controlling…
Active nematic models explain the topological defects and flow patterns observed in epithelial tissues, but the nature of active stress-whether it is extensile or contractile, a key parameter of the theory-is not well established…
In a diversity of physiological contexts, eukaryotic cells adhere to an extracellular matrix (ECM), a disordered network with complex nonlinear mechanics. Such cells can perform mechanosensation: using local force probing they can measure…