Related papers: Cell reorientation under cyclic stretching
Cells actively probe and respond to the stiffness of their surroundings. Since mechanosensory cells in connective tissue are surrounded by a disordered network of biopolymers, their in vivo mechanical environment can be extremely…
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…
We propose a minimal mathematical model to explain long-range coordination of dynamics of multiple cells in epithelial spreading, which may be induced, under different conditions, by a chemical signal, or mechanical stress, or both. The…
When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and…
In the absence of environmental cues, a migrating cell performs an isotropic random motion. Recently, the breaking of this isotropy has been observed when cells move in the presence of asymmetric adhesive patterns. However, up to now the…
A simple model is studied for the chemotactic movement of biological cells in the presence of a periodic chemical wave. It incorporates the feature of adaptation that may play an important role in allowing for ``rectified" chemotaxis:…
Cells move by run and tumble, a kind of dynamics in which the cell alternates runs over straight lines and re-orientations. This erratic motion may be influenced by external factors, like chemicals, nutrients, the extra-cellular matrix, in…
The effects of cell size and deformability on the lateral migration and deformation of living cells flowing through a rectangular microchannel has been numerically investigated and compared with the inertial-microfluidics data on detection…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
Coordinated and cooperative motion of cells is essential for embryonic development, tissue morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer invasion. A predictive understanding of the emergent mechanical behaviors in collective cell motion is…
This article reviews the mechanical bidomain model, a mathematical description how the extracellular matrix and intracellular cytoskeleton are coupled by integrin proteins. The fundamental hypothesis is that differences between…
The homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
Two-dimensional (2D) mechanical models of confluent tissues have related the mechanical state of a monolayer of cells to the average perimeter length of the cell cross sections, predicting floppiness or rigidity of the material. For the…
The main purpose of this work is the mathematical modelling of large populations of cells under different deterministic interactions among themselves, in balance with naturally random diffusion. We focus on cell-cell adhesion mechanisms for…
Cell decision-making refers to the process by which cells gather information from their local microenvironment and regulate their internal states to create appropriate responses. Microenvironmental cell sensing plays a key role in this…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
Cell spreading and motility on an adhesive substrate are driven by the active physical forces generated by the actin cytoskeleton. We have recently shown that coupling curved membrane complexes to protrusive forces, exerted by the actin…
We introduce a continuum model for a fibre reinforced material in which the reference orientation of the fibre may evolve with time, under the influence of external stimuli. The model is formulated in the framework of large strain…
Very thin elastic sheets, even at zero temperature, exhibit nonlinear elastic response by virtue of their dominant bending modes. Their behavior is even richer at finite temperature. Here we use molecular dynamics (MD) to study the…