Related papers: Physical limits on cellular directional mechanosen…
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,…
Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…
The shape that stem cells reach at the end of adhesion process influences their differentiation. Rearrangement of cytoskeleton and modification of intracellular tension may activate mechanotransduction pathways controlling cell commitment.…
Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
We propose a minimal mathematical model to explain long-range coordination of dynamics of multiple cells in epithelial spreading, which may be induced, under different conditions, by a chemical signal, or mechanical stress, or both. The…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
Many eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells can exhibit remarkable sensing ability under small gradient of chemical compound. In this study, we approach this phenomenon by considering the contribution of multiple ligands to the chemical kinetics…
The mechanical properties of PC12 living cells have been studied at the nanoscale with a Force Feedback Microscope using two experimental approaches. Firstly, the local mechanical impedance of the cell membrane has been mapped…
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
We introduce two 2D mechanical models reproducing the evolution of two viscous tissues in contact. Their main property is to model the swirling cell motions while keeping the tissues segregated, as observed during vertebrate embryo…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
Cell membrane tension directly influences various cellular functions. In this study, we developed a method to estimate surface tension from time-series data. We obtained the curvature-velocity relationship from time-series of binarized cell…
Gradient sensing requires at least two measurements at different points in space. These measurements must then be communicated to a common location to be compared, which is unavoidably noisy. While much is known about the limits of…
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…
In the framework of a phase field model of a single cell crawling on a substrate, we investigate how the properties of the cell membrane affect the shape and motility of the cell. Since the membrane influences the cell dynamics on multiple…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
Adhesion-dependent cells actively sense the mechanical properties of their environment through mechanotransductory processes at focal adhesions, which are integrin-based contacts connecting the extracellular matrix to the cytoskeleton. Here…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
Neuronal growth cones are the most sensitive amongst eukaryotic cells in responding to directional chemical cues. Although a dynamic microtubule cytoskeleton has been shown to be essential for growth cone turning, the precise nature of…