Related papers: Getting into shape: how do rod-like bacteria contr…

Bacteria commonly inhabit porous environments such as host tissues, soil, and marine sediments, where complex geometries constrain and redirect their motion. Although bacterial motility has been studied in porous media, the roles of cell…

Filamentous cyanobacteria, forming long strands of connected cells, are one of the earliest and most successful forms of life on Earth. They exhibit self-organised behaviour, forming large-scale patterns in structures like biomats and…

The twisting and writhing of a cell body and associated mechanical stresses is an underappreciated constraint on microbial self-propulsion. Multi-flagellated bacteria can even buckle and writhe under their own activity as they swim through…

Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…

Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…

Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…

Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…

As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…

Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…

Culturing cells confined in microscale geometries has been reported in many studies this last decade, in particular following the development of microfluidic-based applications and lab-on-a-chip devices. Such studies usually examine growth…

Directed growth, anisotropic cell shapes, and confinement drive self-organization in multicellular systems. We investigate the influence of particle shape on the distribution and dynamics of nematic microdomains in a minimal in-silico model…

Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…

Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…

The generation of anisotropic shapes occurs during morphogenesis of almost all organisms. With the recent renewal of the interest in mechanical aspects of morphogenesis, it has become clear that mechanics contributes to anisotropic forms in…

How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solid-like to a fluid-like state or vice versa. Here, we introduce a new way for…

Rigidity transitions in simple models of confluent cells have been a powerful organizing principle in understanding the dynamics and mechanics of dense biological tissue. In this work we explore the interplay between geometry and rigidity…

The optimal shapes attained by contractile cells on adhesive substrates are determined by the interplay between intracellular forces and adhesion with the extracellular matrix. We model the cell as a contractile film bounded by an elastic…

In densely-packed two-dimensional systems of growing cells, such as rod-shaped bacteria, a number of experimental and numerical studies report distinct patterns of nematic orientational order in the presence of confinement. So far, these…

Plants are a paradigm for active shape control in response to stimuli. For instance, it is well-known that a tilted plant will eventually straighten vertically, demonstrating the influence of both an external stimulus, gravity, and an…

In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…