Related papers: Physics of adherent cells
When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and…
The mechanical properties of the cell depend crucially on the tension of its cytoskeleton, a biopolymer network that is put under stress by active motor proteins. While the fibrous nature of the network is known to strongly affect the…
We study interactions between biological cells that apply anisotropic active mechanical forces on an elastic substrate. We model the cells as thin discs that along their perimeters apply radial, but angle-dependent forces on the substrate.…
Cell--cell and cell-matrix adhesions play essential roles in the function of tissues. There is growing evidence for the importance of crosstalk between these two adhesion types, yet little is known about the impact of these interactions on…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
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…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
As a fundamental force, friction exerts a profound influence on various aspects of our daily lives across multiple disciplines. To understand why adhesive friction is associated with the contact area, here we investigate the generic sliding…
The shape of materials is often subject to a number of geometric constraints that limit the size of the system or fix the structure of its boundary. In soft and biological materials, however, these constraints are not always hard, but are…
Mechanical force regulates the formation and growth of cell-cell junctions. Cadherin is a prominent homotypic cell adhesion molecule that plays a crucial role in establishment of intercellular adhesion. It is known that the transmitted…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Adhesion plays an integral role in diverse biological functions ranging from cellular transport to tissue development. Estimation of adhesion strength, therefore, becomes important to gain biophysical insight into these phenomena. In this…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
Adhesion bonds between membranes and surfaces are attracted to each other via effective interactions whose origin the entropy loss due to the reduction in the amplitude of the membrane thermal fluctuations in the vicinity of the adhesion…
Various adhesion mechanisms that have been understood in the field of synthetic adhesives are described and these are linked with situations relevant to fouling issues. The review mainly deals with mechanical aspects of adhesion phenomena,…
Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…
We demonstrate how concepts of statistical mechanics of interacting particles can have important implications in the choice of interaction potentials to model qualitative properties of cell aggregates in theoretical biology. We illustrate…
Tissues are subjected to large external forces and undergo global deformations during morphogenesis. We use synthetic analogues of tissues to study the impact of cell-cell adhesion on the response of cohesive cellular assemblies under such…