Related papers: Actomyosin contractility rotates the cell nucleus
Recent experiments have shown how nematically-ordered tactoid shaped actin droplets can be reorganized and divided by the action of myosin molecular motors. In this paper, we consider how similar morphological changes can potentially be…
A motile cell, when stimulated, shows a dramatic increase in the activity of its membrane, manifested by the appearance of dynamic membrane structures such as lamellipodia, filopodia and membrane ruffles. The external stimulus turns on…
Understanding chromatin organization and dynamics is important since they crucially affect DNA functions. In this study, we investigate chromatin dynamics by statistically analyzing single-nucleosome movement in living human cells. Bi-modal…
Cell shape changes, essential for processes such as motility or division, are controlled by the actomyosin cortex that actively remodels biological membranes. Their mechanisms can be deciphered in___vitro using biomimetic reconstituted…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
The polarization and motility of eukaryotic cells depends on assembly and contraction of the actin cytoskeleton and its regulation by proteins called GTPases. The activity of GTPases causes assembly of filamentous actin (by GTPases Cdc42,…
The migratory dynamics of cells in physiological processes, ranging from wound healing to cancer metastasis, rely on contact-mediated cell-cell interactions. These interactions play a key role in shaping the stochastic trajectories of…
The cell nucleus is enveloped by a complex membrane, whose wrinkling has been implicated in disease and cellular aging. The biophysical dynamics and spectral evolution of nuclear wrinkling during multicellular development remain poorly…
Background and Objectives: The mechanics of the nucleus depends on cellular structures and architecture, and impact a number of diseases. Nuclear mechanics is yet rather complex due to heterogeneous distribution of dense heterochromatin and…
Oscillatory behaviour in force-generating systems is a pervasive phenomenon in cell biology. In this work, we investigate how oscillations in the actomyosin cytoskeleton drive cell shape changes during the process of Dorsal Closure, a…
Spatiotemporal coordination of chromatin and subnuclear compartments is crucial for cells. Numerous enzymes act inside nucleus\textemdash some of those transiently link and pass two chromatin segments. Here we study how such an active…
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…
Cells in an epithelial monolayer coordinate motion with their neighbors giving rise to collectively moving packs of sizes spanning multiple cell diameters. The physical mechanism controlling the pack size, however, remains unclear. A…
We perform an analytical investigation of the cell interface dynamics in the framework of a minimal phase field model of cell motility suggested in [1], which consists of two coupled evolution equations for the order parameter and a…
The eukaryotic cell nucleus harbors the DNA genome that is organized in a dynamic chromatin network and embedded in a viscous crowded fluid. This environment directly affects enzymatic reactions and target search processes that access the…
Cell spreading and motility on an adhesive substrate are driven by the active physical forces generated by the actin cytoskeleton. We have recently shown that coupling curved membrane complexes to protrusive forces, exerted by the actin…
In the absence of environmental cues, a migrating cell performs an isotropic random motion. Recently, the breaking of this isotropy has been observed when cells move in the presence of asymmetric adhesive patterns. However, up to now the…
Macroscopic properties and shapes of biological tissues depend on the remodelling of cell-cell junctions at the microscopic scale. We propose a theoretical framework that couples a vertex model of solid confluent tissues with the dynamics…
The composite cytoskeleton, comprising interacting networks of semiflexible actin and rigid microtubules, actively generates forces and restructures using motor proteins such as myosins to enable key mechanical processes including cell…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…