Related papers: Energy barriers govern glassy dynamics in tissues
Single and collective cell migration are fundamental processes critical for physiological phenomena ranging from embryonic development and immune response to wound healing and cancer metastasis. To understand cell migration from a physical…
Plastic rearrangements play a crucial role in the characterization of soft-glassy materials, such as emulsions and foams. Based on numerical simulations of soft-glassy systems, we study the dynamics of plastic rearrangements at the…
Restrictions to molecular motion by barriers (membranes) are ubiquitous in biological tissues, porous media and composite materials. A major challenge is to characterize the microstructure of a material or an organism nondestructively using…
We present a simple mathematical model of glassy dynamics seen as a random walk in a directed, weighted network of minima taken as a representation of the energy landscape. Our approach gives a broader perspective to previous studies…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Dense assemblies of self-propelled particles undergo a nonequilibrium form of glassy dynamics. Physical intuition suggests that increasing departure from equilibrium due to active forces fluidifies a glassy system. We falsify this belief by…
Developing epithelial tissues coordinate cell proliferation and mechanical forces to achieve proper size and shape. As epithelial cells tightly adhere together to form the confluent tissue, the distribution of cell areas significantly…
Bacterial assemblies exhibit rich collective behaviors that control their biological functions, making them a relevant object of study from an active matter physics perspective. Dense bacterial suspensions self-organize into distinct…
In this note we study the dynamics of a model recently introduced by one of us, that displays glassy phenomena in absence of energy barriers. Using an adiabatic hypothesis we derive an equation for the evolution of the energy as a function…
Foams and dense emulsions display complex mechanical behavior, including intermittent rearrangement dynamics, power-law rheology, and slow recovery after perturbation. These effects have long been considered evidence for glassy physics in…
The dynamics of dislocations is reported to exhibit glassy properties. We study numerically various versions of 2d edge dislocation systems in the absence of externally applied stress. Two types of glassy behavior are identified: (i)…
Collective migration dominates many phenomena, from cell movement in living systems to abiotic self-propelling particles. Focusing on the early stages of tumor evolution, we enunciate the principles involved in cell dynamics and highlight…
Collective cell migration contributes to embryogenesis, wound healing and tumor metastasis. Cell monolayer migration experiments help understanding what determines the movement of cells far from the leading edge. Inhibiting cell…
The glassy dynamics in confluent epithelial monolayers is crucial for several biological processes, such as wound healing, embryogenesis, cancer progression, etc. Several experiments have indicated that, unlike particulate systems, the…
The glassy cytoplasm, crowded with bio-macromolecules, is fluidized in living cells by mechanical energy derived from metabolism. Characterizing the living cytoplasm as a non-equilibrium system is crucial in elucidating the intricate…
In this paper we present an exact study of the relaxation dynamics of the backgammon model. This is a model of a gas of particles in a discrete space which presents glassy phenomena as a result of {\it entropy barriers} in configuration…
Cell-to-cell variability is inherent to numerous biological processes, including cell migration. Quantifying and characterizing the variability of migrating cells is challenging, as it requires monitoring many cells for long time windows…
Cells coexist together in colonies or as tissues. Their behaviour is controlled by an interplay between intercellular forces and biochemical regulation. We develop a simple model of the cell cycle, the fundamental regulatory network…
We report an experimental investigation of the caging motion in a uniformly heated granular fluid, for a wide range of filling fractions, $\phi$. At low $\phi$ the classic diffusive behavior of a fluid is observed. However, as $\phi$ is…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…