Related papers: A modular approach to adaptive structures
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…
Interactions between crawling cells, which are essential for many biological processes, can be quantified by measuring cell-cell collisions. Conventionally, experiments of cell-cell collisions are conducted on two-dimensional flat…
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…
In vivo and in vitro cells rely on the support of an underlying biocompatible substrate, such as the extracellular matrix or a culture substrate, to spread and proliferate. The mechanical and chemical properties of such structures play a…
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…
The interaction of the actin cytoskeleton with cell-substrate adhesions is necessary for cell migration. While the trajectories of motile cells have a stochastic character, investigations of cell motility mechanisms rarely elaborate on the…
Nanofibrillated cellulose, a polymer that can be obtained from one of the most abundant biopolymers in Nature, is being increasingly explored due to its outstanding properties for packaging and device applications. Still, open challenges in…
As one of the most robust global optimization methods, simulated annealing has received considerable attention, with many variations that attempt to improve the cooling schedule. This paper introduces a variant of simulated annealing that…
Active metamaterials are a type of metamaterial with tunable properties enabled by structural reconfigurations. Existing active metamaterials often achieve only a limited number of structural reconfigurations upon the application of an…
Polymers with the same chemical composition can provide different properties by reducing the dimension or simply by altering their nanostructure. Recent literature works report hundreds of examples of advances methods in the fabrication of…
The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Contemporary sensorimotor learning approaches typically start with an existing complex agent (e.g., a robotic arm), which they learn to control. In contrast, this paper investigates a modular co-evolution strategy: a collection of primitive…
Shape morphing magnetic soft materials, composed of magnetic particles in a soft polymer matrix, can transform shapes reversibly, remotely, and rapidly, finding diverse applications in actuators, soft robotics, and biomedical devices. To…
Recent applications of machine learning, in particular deep learning, motivate the need to address the generalizability of the statistical inference approaches in physical sciences. In this letter, we introduce a modular physics guided…
Mathematical models are increasingly used in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry to understand how phenotypes emerge from systems of molecular interactions. However, their current construction as monolithic sets of equations…
We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…
Crawling cell motility is vital to many biological processes such as wound healing and the immune response. Using a minimal model we investigate the effects of patterned substrate adhesiveness and biophysical cell parameters on the…
Collective cell migration in cohesive units is vital for tissue morphogenesis, wound repair, and immune response. While the fundamental driving forces for collective cell motion stem from contractile and protrusive activities of individual…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…