Related papers: An asymmetry between pushing and pulling for crawl…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
Many cell types display random motility on two-dimensional substrates, but crawl persistently in a single direction when confined in a microchannel or on an adhesive micropattern. Does this imply that the motility mechanism of confined…
Material renewability in active living systems, such as in cells and tissues, can drive the large-scale patterning of forces, with distinctive phenotypic consequences. This is especially significant in the cell cytoskeleton, where multiple…
We study pattern formation, fluctuations and scaling induced by a growth-promoting active walker on an otherwise static interface. Active particles on an interface define a simple model for energy consuming proteins embedded in the plasma…
Mechanical forces generated by myosin II molecular motors drive diverse cellular processes, most notably shape change, division and locomotion. These forces may be transmitted over long range through the cytoskeletal medium - a disordered,…
Cell migration is fundamental to development, tissue organization, immune response, and disease progression. Amoeboid motility is distinguished by rapid motion and strongly fluctuating cell shapes, reflecting the intrinsically nonlinear…
We present a deformation-dependent propulsion phenomenon for soft particles such as cells in microchannels. It is based on a broken time reversal symmetry generated by a fast forward and slow backward motion of a fluid which does not…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Living systems often exhibit internal driving: active, molecular processes drive nonequilibrium phenomena such as metabolism or migration. Active gels constitute a fascinating class of internally driven matter, where molecular motors exert…
Based on experimental observations it is known that various biological cells exhibit a persistent random walk during migration on flat substrates. The persistent random walk is characterized by `stop-and-go' movements : unidirectional…
We explore a generic mechanism whereby a droplet of active matter acquires motility by the spontaneous breakdown of a discrete symmetry. The model we study offers a simple representation of a "cell extract" comprising, e.g., a droplet of…
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
Crawling cell motility is vital to many biological processes such as wound healing and the immune response. Using a minimal model we investigate the effects of patterned substrate adhesiveness and biophysical cell parameters on the…
Curvature in biological membranes can be generated by a variety of different molecular mechanisms such as protein scaffolding, lipid or protein asymmetry, cytoskeletal forces, etc. These mechanisms have the net effect of generating stresses…
This paper presents a real-time simulation involving ''protozoan-like'' cells that evolve by natural selection in a physical 2D ecosystem. Selection pressure is exerted via the requirements to collect mass and energy from the surroundings…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
Cells accomplish diverse functions using the same molecular building blocks, from setting up cytoplasmic flows to generating mechanical forces. In particular, transitions between these non-equilibrium states are triggered by regulating the…
Force fluctuations exhibited in focal adhesions (FAs) that connect a cell to its extracellular environment, point to the complex role of the underlying machinery that controls cell migration. To elucidate the explicit role of myosin motors…
Experiments suggest that the migration of some cells in the three-dimensional extra cellular matrix bears strong resemblance to one-dimensional cell migration. Motivated by this observation, we construct and study a minimal one-dimensional…