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Related papers: Geometric friction directs cell migration

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Soft and biological matter come in a variety of shapes and geometries. When soft surfaces that do not fit into each other due to a mismatch in Gaussian curvatures form an interface, beautiful geometry-induced patterns emerge. In this paper,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-04-05 Aashna Chawla , Deepak Kumar

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…

Biological Physics · Physics 2026-03-09 Anh Q. Nguyen , Pradip K. Bera , Jacob Notbohm , Dapeng Bi

Cell migration is fundamental to development, tissue organization, immune response, and disease progression. Amoeboid motility is distinguished by rapid motion and strongly fluctuating cell shapes, reflecting the intrinsically nonlinear…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-19 Winfried Schmidt , Chaouqi Misbah , Alexander Farutin

In this paper we study crawling locomotion based on directional frictional interactions, namely, frictional forces that are sensitive to the sign of the sliding velocity. Surface interactions of this type are common in biology, where they…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2015-03-31 Paolo Gidoni , Giovanni Noselli , Antonio DeSimone

The growth of actin filament networks is a fundamental biological process that drives a variety of cellular and intracellular motions. During motility, eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens are propelled by actin networks organized…

Biological Physics · Physics 2009-11-13 Joshua W. Shaevitz , Daniel A. Fletcher

Biological cells are able to adapt their behaviour in response to environmental cues. Durotaxis is a phenomenon in which cells adjust their migration depending on the mechanical properties of a surrounding substrate. Although durotaxis has…

Biological Physics · Physics 2026-05-11 Sohei Nakamura , Mitsusuke Tarama

Collective cell migration in epithelia relies on cell intercalation: a local remodelling of the cellular network that allows neighbouring cells to swap their positions. Unlike foams and passive cellular fluid, in epithelial intercalation…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-10-31 Dimitrios Krommydas , Livio Nicola Carenza , Luca Giomi

Cell adhesion and migration are strongly influenced by extracellular matrix (ECM) architecture and rigidity, but little is known about the concomitant influence of such environmental signals to cell responses, especially when considering…

Grain boundary (GB) migration governs microstructure evolution and can mediate plastic deformation through sliding or shear coupling. Numerous experimental and numerical studies have reported a wide range of behaviors associated with…

Materials Science · Physics 2026-02-03 Brandon Runnels

Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…

The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…

Cells and organisms follow aligned structures in their environment, a process that can generate persistent migration paths. Kinetic transport equations are a popular modelling tool for describing biological movements at the mesoscopic…

Cell Behavior · Quantitative Biology 2021-01-13 Nadia Loy , Thomas Hillen , Kevin John Painter

Cell-cell adhesion plays a vital role in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. One of its functions is regulation of cell migration, such as occurs, e.g. during embryogenesis or in cancer. In this work, we develop a…

Tissues and Organs · Quantitative Biology 2024-03-08 Anna Zhigun , Mabel Lizzy Rajendran

Adherent cells have long been known to display two modes during migration: a faster mode that is persistent in direction and a slower one where they turn. Compared to the persistent mode, the turns are less studied. Here we develop a simple…

Biological Physics · Physics 2025-05-23 Yiyu Zhang , Xiaoyu Yu , Boyuan Zheng , Ye Xu , Qihui Fan , Fangfu Ye , Da Wei

Cellular self-assembly and organization are fundamental steps for the development of biological tissues. In this paper, within the framework of a cellular automata model, we address how an ordered tissue pattern spontaneously emerges from a…

Biological Physics · Physics 2019-10-24 Debangana Mukhopadhyay , Rumi De

We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-12-19 Amabile Tatone , Filippo Recrosi , Giuseppe Tomassetti

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…

Cell Behavior · Quantitative Biology 2016-05-09 Patrick Bitter , Kristof Leon Beck , Peter Lenz

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-01-05 Jen-Yu Lo , Yuan-Heng Tseng , Hsuan-Yi Chen

Interface migration in microstructures is mediated by the motion of line defects with step and dislocation character, i.e., disconnections. We propose a continuum model for arbitrarily-curved grain boundaries or heterophase interfaces…

Materials Science · Physics 2023-05-15 Caihao Qiu , Marco Salvalaglio , David J. Srolovitz , Jian Han

The extra-cellular microenvironment has a fundamental role in tumor growth and progression, strongly affecting the migration strategies adopted by single cancer cells during metastatic invasion. In this study, we use a novel microfluidic…