Related papers: Propagating stress waves during epithelial expansi…
The relationship between cell density and velocity is often assumed to be negative, reflecting crowding-induced suppression of movement. However, observations across systems reveal a more nuanced picture: while some emphasize contact…
Stress propagation in nonlinear media is crucial in cell biology, where molecular motors exert anisotropic force dipoles on the fibrous cytoskeleton. While the force dipoles can be either contractile or expansile, a medium made of fibers…
We present a model for the dynamics of elastic or poroelastic bodies with monopolar repulsive long-range (electrostatic) interactions at large strains. Our model respects (only) locally the non-self-interpenetration condition but can cope…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
The morphogenesis of cells and tissues involves an interplay between chemical signals and active forces on their surrounding surface layers. The complex interaction of hydrodynamics and material flows on such active surfaces leads to…
Cell extravasation is a crucial step of the metastatic cascade. In this process, the circulating tumor cells inside the blood vessels adhere to the cell monolayer of the blood vessel wall and passes through it, which allows them to invade…
In this work we approach cell migration under a large-scale assumption, so that the system reduces to a particle in motion. Unlike classical particle models, the cell displacement results from its internal activity: the cell velocity is a…
In this paper, we study how cytoskeletal remodeling is correlated to changes in subcellular microrheology. We analyze the changes in the magnitude and directionality of the shear and elastic moduli of bovine aortic endothelial cells (BAECs)…
External stress can accelerate molecular mobility of amorphous solids by several orders of magnitude. The changes in mobility are commonly interpreted through the Eyring model, which invokes an empirical activation volume whose origin…
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…
We study wave propagation in networks of coupled cells which can behave as excitable or self-oscillatory media. For excitable media, an asymptotic construction of wave trains is presented. This construction predicts their shape and speed,…
We introduce a model for zwitterionic monolayers and investigate its tribological response to changes in applied load, sliding velocity, and temperature by means of molecular-dynamics simulations. The proposed model exhibits different…
Swelling is a volumetric-growth process in which a porous material expands by spontaneous imbibition of additional pore fluid. Swelling is distinct from other growth processes in that it is inherently poromechanical: Local expansion of the…
Fundamental biological and biomimetic processes, from tissue morphogenesis to soft robotics, rely on the propagation of chemical and mechanical surface waves to signal and coordinate active force generation. The complex interplay between…
Cells exert traction forces on compliant substrates and can induce surface instabilities that appear as characteristic wrinkling patterns. Here, we develop a mechanical description of cell-induced wrinkling on soft substrates using a thin…
In this paper, we derive an effective model for transport processes in periodically perforated elastic media, taking into account, e.g., cyclic elastic deformations as they occur in lung tissue due to respiratory movement. The underlying…
Many eukaryotic cells are able to perform directional mechanosensing by directly measuring minute spatial differences in the mechanical stress on their membranes. Here, we explore the limits of a single mechanosensitive channel activation…
Proliferating cell collectives often develop an active growth layer near their boundary that regulates expansion and morphology, as observed in systems ranging from bacterial biofilms to epithelial tissues and tumor spheroids. While such…
Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…
The response of cells during spreading and motility is dictated by several multi-physics events, which are triggered by extracellular cues and occur at different time-scales. For this sake, it is not completely appropriate to provide a cell…