Related papers: Cell reorientation under cyclic stretching
Continuum elasticity is a powerful tool applicable in a broad range of physical systems and phenomena. Yet, understanding how and on what scales material disorder may lead to the breakdown of continuum elasticity is not fully understood. We…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Mechanics and biochemical signaling are both often deregulated in cancer, leading to cancer cell phenotypes that exhibit increased invasiveness, proliferation, and survival. The dynamics and interactions of cytoskeletal components control…
Recent experiments in various cell types have shown that two-dimensional tissues often display local nematic order, with evidence of extensile stresses manifest in the dynamics of topological defects. Using a mesoscopic model where tissue…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
Biological membranes undergo noticeable thermal fluctuations at physiological temperatures. When two membranes approach each other, they hinder the out of plane fluctuations of the other. This hindrance leads to an entropic repulsive force…
Tissues are characterized by layers of functional units such as cells and extracellular matrix (ECM). Nevertheless, how dynamics at interlayer interfaces help transmit cellular forces in tissues remains overlooked. Here, we investigate a…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
We show how strain stiffening affects the elastic response to internal forces, caused either by material defects and inhomogeneities or by active forces that molecular motors generate in living cells. For a spherical force dipole in a…
Understanding how biomechanical reorganization governs key biological processes, such as morphogenesis and development, requires predictive insights into stress distributions and cellular behavior. While traditional approaches focused on…
In many adult tissues, stem cells and differentiated cells are not homogeneously distributed : stem cells are arranged in periodic "niches", and differentiated cells are constantly produced and migrate out of these niches. In this article,…
The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility. It mainly focuses…
Contractile forces exerted on the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM) lead to the alignment and stretching of constituent fibers within the vicinity of cells. As a consequence, the matrix reorganizes to form thick bundles of aligned…
Ordered polarity alignment of a cell population plays a vital role in biology, such as in hair follicle alignment and asymmetric cell division. Here, we propose a theoretical framework for the understanding of generic dynamical properties…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
Experimentally measuring the elastic properties of thin biological surfaces is non-trivial, particularly when they are curved. One technique that may be used is the indentation of a thin sheet of material by a rigid indenter, whilst…
Eukaryotic cells are mechanically supported by a polymer network called the cytoskeleton, which consumes chemical energy to dynamically remodel its structure. Recent experiments in vivo have revealed that this remodeling occasionally…
Galvanotaxis is believed to be driven by the redistribution of transmembrane proteins and other molecules, referred to as "sensors", through electrophoresis and electroosmosis. Here, we update our previous model of the limits of…
The spatiotemporal coordination and regulation of cell proliferation is fundamental in many aspects of development and tissue maintenance. Cells have the ability to adapt their division rates in response to mechanical constraints, yet we do…