Related papers: Getting into shape: how do rod-like bacteria contr…
Colonies of bacteria grown on thin agar plate exhibit fractal patterns as a result of adaptation to their environments. The bacterial colony pattern formation is regulated crucially by chemotaxis, the movement of cells along a chemical…
How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…
We systematically investigate how flagellar morphology governs the stability of bacterial Brownian motion, evaluating the effectiveness of a simplified chiral two-body model. This model, which effectively captures the specific bacterial…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
Living cells maintain size homeostasis by actively compensating for size fluctuations. Here, we present two stochastic maps that unify phenomenological models by integrating fluctuating single-cell growth rates and size-dependent noise…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
How cells maintain a stable size has fascinated scientists since the beginning of modern biology, but has remained largely mysterious. Recently, however, the ability to analyze single bacteria in real time has provided new, important…
The growth and scaling of organs is a fundamental aspect of animal development. However, how organs grow to the right size and shape required by physiological demands, remains largely unknown. Here, we provide a framework combining theory…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Bacteria have remarkably robust cell shape control mechanisms. For example, cell diameter only varies by a few percent across a population. MreB is necessary for establishment and maintenance of rod shape although the mechanism of shape…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
We present a minimal continuum model of strongly adhering cells as active contractile isotropic media and use the model to study the effect of the geometry of the adhesion patch in controlling the spatial distribution of traction and…
Living systems are chiral on multiple scales, from constituent biopolymers to large scale morphology, and their active mechanics is both driven by chiral components and serves to generate chiral morphologies. We describe the mechanics of…
Some dividing cells sense their shape by becoming polarized along their long axis. Cell polarity is controlled in part by polarity proteins like Rho GTPases cycling between active membrane-bound forms and inactive cytosolic forms, modeled…
Cells often divide under mechanical confinement, where surrounding structures restrict shape changes during cytokinesis. Although forces generated during confined division have been measured experimentally, it remains unclear how…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Shells, when confined, can deform in a broad assortment of shapes and patterns, often quite dissimilar to what is produced by their flat counterparts (plates). In this work we discuss the morphological landscape of shells deposited on a…
During the development of an organism, cells must coordinate and organize to generate the correct shape, structure, and spatial patterns of tissues and organs, a process known as morphogenesis. The morphogenesis of embryonic tissues is…
When treated with antibiotics below the minimum inhibitory concentration, bacterial cell division turns off, but cell growth does not. Thus, rod-like bacteria, including E. coli, can elongate many times their length without increasing their…