Related papers: Shape mode analysis exposes movement patterns in b…

Cell motility in dense cell collectives is pivotal in various diseases like cancer metastasis and asthma. A central aspect in these phenomena is the heterogeneity in cell motility, but identifying the motility of individual cells is…

Life presents fascinating examples of self-organization and emergent phenomena. In multi-cellular organisms, a multitude of cells interact to form and maintain highly complex body plans of well-defined size. In this thesis, we investigate…

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…

Caenorhabditis elegans, a free-living soil nematode, propels itself by producing undulatory body motion and displays a rich variety of body shapes and trajectories during its locomotion in complex environments. Here we show that the complex…

Living biological tissue is a complex system, constantly growing and changing in response to external and internal stimuli. These processes lead to remarkable and intricate changes in shape. Modeling and understanding both natural and…

Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…

The 1mm roundworm C. elegans is a model organism used in many sub-areas of biology to investigate different types of biological processes. In order to complement the n-vivo analysis with computer-based investigations, several methods have…

In this note we describe a discrete dynamical system acting on the similarity classes of a plane convex body within the affine class of the body. We find invariant elements in all affine classes, and describe the orbits of bodies in some…

Nature uses elongated shapes and filaments to build stable structures, generate motion, and allow complex geometric interactions. In this Review, we examine the role of biological filaments across different length scales. From the molecular…

This paper develops a generative statistical model for representing, modeling, and comparing the morphological evolution of biological cells undergoing motility. It uses the elastic shape analysis to separate cell kinematics (overall…

We explore a simplified class of models we call swarms, which are inspired by the collective behavior of social insects. We perform a mean-field stability analysis and perform numerical simulations of the model. Several interesting types of…

We present a machine learning approach that leverages persistent homology to classify bacterial flagellar motors into two functional states: rotated and stalled. By embedding protein structural data into a topological framework, we extract…

We exploit the reduced space of C. elegans postures to develop a novel tracking algorithm which captures both simple shapes and also self-occluding coils, an important, yet unexplored, component of worm behavior. We apply our algorithm to…

Organisms move through the world by changing their shape, and here we explore the mapping from shape space to movements in the nematode C. elegans as it crawls on a planar agar surface. We characterize the statistics of the trajectories…

Although the auger-like 'swimming' motility of the African trypanosome was described upon its discovery over one hundred years ago, the precise biomechanical and biophysical properties of trypanosome flagellar motion has not been…

The eukaryotic flagellum beats periodically, driven by the oscillatory dynamics of molecular motors, to propel cells and pump fluids. Small, but perceivable fluctuations in the beat of individual flagella have physiological implications for…

A simplified model of the bird skeleton along with elongation parameters for the flight feathers is used to explore the diversity of bird shapes. Varying a small number of parameters simulates a wide range of observed bird silhouettes. The…

We present a mathematical model of lophotrichous bacteria, motivated by Pseudomonas putida, which swim through fluid by rotating a cluster of multiple flagella extended from near one pole of the cell body. Although the flagella rotate…

Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…

In this paper, we derive new shape descriptors based on a directional characterization. The main idea is to study the behavior of the shape neighborhood under family of transformations. We obtain a description invariant with respect to…