Related papers: Energy barriers govern glassy dynamics in tissues
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 homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
The relationship between cell density and velocity is often assumed to be negative, reflecting crowding-induced suppression of movement. However, observations across systems reveal a more nuanced picture: while some emphasize contact…
Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…
The flows of tissues of epithelial cells often involve T1 transitions. These neighbour exchanges are irreversible rearrangements crossing an energy barrier. Here, by an exact geometric construction, I determine this energy barrier for…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
Disks moving in a narrow channel have many features in common with the glassy behavior of hard spheres in three dimensions. In this paper we study the caging behavior of the disks which sets in at characteristic packing fraction $\phi_d$.…
We consider the problem of slow activation dynamics in glassy systems undergoing a random first order phase transition. Using an effective potential approach to supercooled liquids, we determine the spectrum of activation barriers for…
The migratory dynamics of cells can be influenced by the complex micro-environment through which they move. It remains unclear how the motility machinery of confined cells responds and adapts to their micro-environment. Here, we propose a…
The spatiotemporal coordination and regulation of cell proliferation is fundamental in many aspects of development and tissue maintenance. Cells have the ability to adapt their division rates in response to mechanical constraints, yet we do…
By modifying and calibrating an active vertex model to experiments, we have simulated numerically a confluent cellular monolayer spreading on an empty space and the collision of two monolayers of different cells in an antagonistic migration…
Collective motion of cells is common in many physiological processes, including tissue development, repair, and tumor formation. Recent experiments have shown that certain malignant cancer cells form clusters in a chemoattractant gradient,…
We present a simple mathematical framework for the description of the dynamics of glassy systems in terms of a random walk in a complex energy landscape pictured as a network of minima. We show how to use the tools developed for the study…
Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…
We investigate the near-surface relaxation of freestanding atactic \glsdesc{ps} films with molecular dynamics simulations. As in previous coarse-grained simulations, relaxation times for backbone segments and phenyl rings are linked to…
Densely packed, motile bacteria can adopt collective states not seen in conventional, passive materials. These states remain in many ways mysterious, and their physical characterization can aid our understanding of natural bacterial…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
The influence of repeated thermal cycling on mechanical properties, structural relaxation, and evolution of the potential energy in binary glasses is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider a binary mixture with…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…