Related papers: Physical limits on cellular directional mechanosen…
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…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
Eukaryotic cells can polarize and migrate in response to electric fields via "galvanotaxis," which aids wound healing. Experimental evidence suggests cells sense electric fields via molecules on the cell's surface redistributing via…
Many eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients by directly measuring spatial concentration differences. The precision of such gradient sensing is limited by fluctuations in the binding of diffusing particles to specific…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Eukaryotic cells perform chemotaxis by determining the direction of chemical gradients based on stochastic sensing of concentrations at the cell surface. To examine the efficiency of this process, previous studies have investigated the…
Cells actively probe and respond to the stiffness of their surroundings. Since mechanosensory cells in connective tissue are surrounded by a disordered network of biopolymers, their in vivo mechanical environment can be extremely…
Many morphogenetic processes involve mechanical rearrangement of epithelial tissues that is driven by precisely regulated cytoskeletal forces and cell adhesion. The mechanical state of the cell and intercellular adhesion are not only the…
Collective cell responses to exogenous cues depend on cell-cell interactions. In principle, these can result in enhanced sensitivity to weak and noisy stimuli. However, this has not yet been shown experimentally, and, little is known about…
Mechanosensitive channels are ion channels activated by membrane tension. We investigate the influence of bacterial mechanosensitive channels spatial distribution on activation (gating). Based on elastic short-range interactions we map this…
Both action potentials and mechanosensitive signalling are an important communication mechanisms in plants. Considering an information theoretic framework, this paper explores the effective range of multiple action potentials for a long…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
Mechanosensation is a key part of the sensory repertoire of a vast array of different cells and organisms. The molecular dissection of the origins of mechanosensation is rapidly advancing as a result of both structural and functional…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
Migrating cells choose their preferential direction of motion in response to different signals and stimuli sensed by spanning their external environment. However, the presence of dense fibrous regions, lack of proper substrate, and cell…
Autologous chemotaxis, in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow, is thwarted at high cell density because molecules from other cells interfere with a given cell's signal. Using a minimal model of…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
Coordinated motion of cell monolayers during epithelial wound healing and tissue morphogenesis involves mechanical stress generation. Here we propose a model for the dynamics of epithelial expansion that couples mechanical deformations in…
Cells perform directed motion in response to external stimuli that they detect by sensing the environment with their membrane protrusions. In particular, several biochemical and biophysical cues give rise to tactic migration in the…