Related papers: Optimality of contraction-driven crawling
Motivated by the motion of nematode sperm cells, we present a model for the motion of an adhesive gel on a solid substrate. The gel polymerizes at the leading edge and depolymerizes at the rear. The motion results from a competition between…
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.…
Routinely navigating through an ever-changing and unsteady environment, and utilizing chemical energy, molecular motors transport the cell's crucial components, such as neurotransmitters and organelles. They generate force and pull cargo,…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
During animal development and homeostasis, the structure of tissues, including muscles, blood vessels and connective tissues adapts to mechanical strains in the extracellular matrix (ECM). These strains originate from the differential…
Understanding the emergence and evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation is a core problem in biology. We develop a quantitative model that shows that a multicellular form emerges from genetically identical unicellular…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…
Within biological fluid dynamics, it is conventional to distinguish between "puller" and "pusher" microswimmers on the basis of the forward or aft location of the flagella relative to the cell body: typically, bacteria are pushers and algae…
Cell motility underlies many biological processes, including cancer metastasis, bacterial infection, and evolutionary adaptation. We introduce a non-equilibrium single-cell motility model inspired by the generalized Langevin equation, which…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
The motion of cells in tissues is an ubiquitous phenomenon. In particular, in monolayered cell colonies in vitro, pronounced collective behavior with swirl-like motion has been observed deep within a cell colony, while at the same time, the…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
This work analyzes fractional continuous-time random walks on two-layer multiplexes. A node-centric dynamics is used, in which it is assumed a Poisson distribution of a walker to become active, while a jump to one of its neighbors depends…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
Animal cells form contractile structures to promote various functions, from cell motility to cell division. Force generation in these structures is often due to molecular motors such as myosin that require polar substrates for their…