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Biological growth is often driven by mechanical cues, such as changes in external pressure or tensile loading. Moreover, it is well known that many living tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal stress, called the…

The spatial organization of bacteria in dense biofilms is key to their collective behaviour, and understanding it will be important for medical and technological applications. Here we study the morphology of a compact biofilm that undergoes…

Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…

Shape anisotropy of individual building blocks plays a crucial role in creating exotic structures and controlling phase behavior in equilibrium systems. We present a combined experimental and simulation study in which we used light-driven…

Variations of transport efficiency in structured environments between distinct individuals in actively self-propelled systems is both hard to study and poorly understood. Here, we study the transport of a non-tumbling {\ecoli} strain, an…

Biologically inspired pressure actuated cellular structures can alter their shape through pressure variations. Previous work introduced a computational framework for pressure actuated cellular structures which was limited to two cell rows…

Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…

The mechanism by which cells measure the dimension of the organ in which they are embedded, and slow down their growth when the final size is reached, is a long-standing problem of developmental biology. The role of mechanics in this…

To maintain a constant cell size, dividing cells have to coordinate cell cycle events with cell growth. This coordination has for long been supposed to rely on the existence of size thresholds determining cell cycle progression [1]. In…

Controlling segregation is both a practical and a theoretical challenge. In this Letter we demonstrate a manner in which rotation-induced segregation may be controlled by altering the geometry of the rotating containers in which granular…

Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…

We examine how the shape of cells and the geometry of experiment affect the reaction-diffusion kinetics at the binding between target and probe molecules on molecular biochips. In particular, we compare the binding kinetics for the probes…

Confining surfaces play crucial roles in dynamics, transport and order in many physical systems, but their effects on active matter, a broad class of dynamically self-organizing systems, are poorly understood. We investigate here the…

Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…

The shape of materials is often subject to a number of geometric constraints that limit the size of the system or fix the structure of its boundary. In soft and biological materials, however, these constraints are not always hard, but are…

Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…

Emergence of regular spatial patterns is a hallmark in living matter ranging from subcellular organelles to developing embryos and to ecosystems. Mechanisms for the formation of ordered spatial patterns in biology often require chemical…

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…

The geometric control of bone tissue growth plays a significant role in bone remodelling, age-related bone loss, and tissue engineering. However, how exactly geometry influences the behaviour of bone-forming cells remains elusive. Geometry…

This work probes the role of cell geometry in orienting self-organized fluid flows in the late stage Drosophila oocyte. Recent theoretical work has shown that a model, which relies only on hydrodynamic interactions of flexible, cortically…