Related papers: Patterns in Space: Coordinating Adhesion and Actom…
Protrusions at the leading-edge of a cell play an important role in sensing the extracellular cues, during cellular spreading and motility. Recent studies provided indications that these protrusions wrap (coil) around the extra-cellular…
The Dynamic Template is applied to muscle cells, and is shown to provide a feedback mechanism that can co-ordinate the rearrangements of cytoskeletal proteins that accompany contraction
Living cells establish long-range orientational order through collective alignment, giving rise to topological defects whose functional relevance is increasingly recognized in tissue organization and morphogenesis. Engineered topographical…
Inspired by recent experimental observation of patterning at the membrane of a living cell, we propose a generic model for the dynamics of a fluctuating interface driven by particle-like inclusions which stimulate its growth. We find that…
Deep learning segmentation and fluorescence imaging techniques allow the cellular morphology of living embryos to be constructed spatiotemporally. These development processes involve numerous molecules distributed at the subcellular scale,…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Actin is a key component of the cytoskeleton, which plays central roles in cell motility, division, growth, and tensile strength. To enable this wide range of transient mechanical processes and properties, networks of actin filaments…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
The actin cytoskeleton of adherent tissue cells often condenses into filament bundles contracted by myosin motors, so-called stress fibers, which play a crucial role in the mechanical interaction of cells with their environment. Stress…
Eukaryotic cells adhere to extracellular matrix during the normal development of the organism, forming static adhesion as well as during cell motility. We study this process by considering a simplified coarse-grained model of a vesicle that…
Mechanochemical patterns arising in the actomyosin cortex drive many cellular processes. Here we consider a hydrodynamic model for the actomyosin cortex of cells and study the sensitivity of the emergent patterns to both physical parameters…
Adhesion-dependent cells actively sense the mechanical properties of their environment through mechanotransductory processes at focal adhesions, which are integrin-based contacts connecting the extracellular matrix to the cytoskeleton. Here…
Magnetic tweezers are used to study the mechanical response under torsion of single nucleosome arrays reconstituted on tandem repeats of 5S positioning sequences. Regular arrays are extremely resilient and can reversibly accommodate a large…
Localized contractile configurations or asters spontaneously appear and disappear as emergent structures in the collective stochastic dynamics of active polar actomyosin filaments. Passive parti- cles which (un)bind to the active filaments…
Intracellular transport is vital for the proper functioning and survival of a cell. Cargo (proteins, vesicles, organelles, etc.) is transferred from its place of creation to its target locations via molecular motor assisted transport along…
Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical…
Experiments suggest that the migration of some cells in the three-dimensional extra cellular matrix bears strong resemblance to one-dimensional cell migration. Motivated by this observation, we construct and study a minimal one-dimensional…
Rotational migration is one specific form of collective cell migration when epithelial cells are confined in a spherical geometry, such as in the epithelial acini. This tissue-level rotation motion is crucial for the morphogenesis of…
Cells continuously probe their environment with membrane receptors, achieving subsecond adaptation of their behaviour [1-3]. Recently, several receptors, including cadherins, were found to bind ligands with a lifetime of order of one…
Eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens such as bacteria or viruses utilize the actin polymerization machinery to propel themselves forward. Thereby, the onset of motion and choice of direction may be the result of a spontaneous…