Related papers: Geometric friction directs cell migration
Cell movement has essential functions in development, immunity and cancer. Various cell migration patterns have been reported and a general rule has recently emerged, the so-called UCSP (Universal Coupling between cell Speed and cell…
Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not completely understood. We consider simplified models for…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
Cell migration is often accompanied by collisions with other cells, which can lead to cessation of movement, repolarization, and migration away from the contact site - a process termed contact inhibition of locomotion (CIL). During CIL, the…
The capability of cells to form surface extensions to non-locally probe the surrounding environment plays a key role in cell migration. The existing mathematical models for migration of cell populations driven by this non-local form of…
We present a systematic study of the influence of cell geometry on the orientational distribution of microtubules (MTs) nucleated from a single microtubule organizing center (MTOC). For simplicity we consider an elliptical cell geometry, a…
Experimental evidence shows that there is a feedback between cell shape and cell motion. How this feedback impacts the collective behavior of dense cell monolayers remains an open question. We investigate the effect of a feedback that tends…
Collective cell migration plays a central role in tissue development, morphogenesis, wound repair and cancer progression. With the growing realization that physical forces mediate cell motility in development and physiology, a key…
Cells are modeled with spherical grains connected each other. Each cell can shrink and swell by transporting its fluid content to other connected neighbor while still maintaining its density at constant value. As a spherical part of a cell…
Many of the biological phenomena involve collective dynamics driven by self-propelled motion and nonequilibrium force (i.e., activity) that result in features unexpected from equilibrium physics. On the other hand, biological experiments…
We investigate the dynamics of a colony of crawling, proliferating cells with a minimal, mechanical cell model. The cells consist of two disks, modelling the cell body and a pseudopod, connected by a finite extensible spring. The cells…
Motility initiation in crawling cells requires transformation of a symmetric state into a polarized state. In contrast, motility arrest is associated with re-symmetrization of the internal configuration of a cell. Experiments on keratocytes…
Convergent extension of epithelial tissue is a key motif of animal morphogenesis. On a coarse scale, cell motion resembles laminar fluid flow; yet in contrast to a fluid, epithelial cells adhere to each other and maintain the tissue layer…
The response of cells during spreading and motility is dictated by several multi-physics events, which are triggered by extracellular cues and occur at different time-scales. For this sake, it is not completely appropriate to provide a cell…
We analyze the rectified motion of a Brownian particle in a confined environment. We show the emergence of strong cooperativity between the inherent rectification of the ratchet mechanism and the entropic bias of the fluctuations caused by…
Cell spreading requires a major reorganisation of the actin cytoskeleton, from a cortical structure to a lamellipodium where filaments are mostly parallel to the substrate. We propose a model inspired by the physics of nematic liquid…
Numerous experimental studies have demonstrated that the microenvironment is a key regulator influencing the proliferative and migrative potentials of species. Spatial and temporal disturbances lead to adverse and hazardous…
Cell-cell adhesion is widely hypothesised to maintain cohesion within the long streams of follower cells that trail leader subpopulations during collective migration, including in neural crest cell migration, angiogenesis, and cancer cell…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Theoretical analysis and fully atomistic molecular dynamics simulations reveal a Brownian ratchet mechanism by which thermal fluctuations drive the net displacement of immiscible liquids confined in channels or pores with micro- or…