Related papers: Maximum velocity of self-propulsion for an active …
Actin flow in the cortical cytoskeleton underneath the cell membrane generates mechanical stresses that shape the cell surface. We study this mechanism using a hydrodynamic model of a compressible active gel polymerizing at the membrane and…
The migratory dynamics of cells can be influenced by the complex micro-environment through which they move. It remains unclear how the motility machinery of confined cells responds and adapts to their micro-environment. Here, we propose a…
A living cell uses long tubular appendages for locomotion and sensory purposes. Hence, assembling and maintaining a protrusion of correct length is crucial for its survival and overall performance. Usually the protrusions lack the machinery…
Cells crawling through tissues migrate inside a complex fibrous environment called the extracellular matrix (ECM), which provides signals regulating motility. Here we investigate one such well-known pathway, involving mutually antagonistic…
Collective cell migration is crucial in many biological processes such as wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and tumor progression. The leading front of a collective migrating epithelial cell layer often destabilizes into multicellular…
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…
The cytoskeleton relies on diverse populations of motors, filaments, and binding proteins acting in concert to enable non-equilibrium processes ranging from mitosis to chemotaxis. Its versatile reconfigurability, programmed by interactions…
The dynamics of active matter driven by interacting molecular motors has a non-potential structure at the local scale. However, we show that there exists a quasi-potential effectively describing the collective self-organization of the…
Cells in an epithelial monolayer coordinate motion with their neighbors giving rise to collectively moving packs of sizes spanning multiple cell diameters. The physical mechanism controlling the pack size, however, remains unclear. A…
Intracellular transport is vital for the proper functioning and survival of a cell. Cargo (proteins, vesicles, organelles, etc.) is transferred from its place of creation to its target locations via molecular motor assisted transport along…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Actomyosin networks are major structural components of the cell. They provide mechanical integrity and allow dynamic remodeling of eukaryotic cells, self-organizing into the diverse patterns essential for development. We provide a…
Cell motility is fundamental to many biological processes, and cells exhibit a variety of migration patterns. Many motile cell types follow a universal law that connects their speed and persistency, a property that can originate from 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…
Motivated by recent experimental results for the step sizes of dynein motor proteins, we develope a cellular automata model for intra-cellular traffic of dynein motors incorporating special features of the hindrance-dependent step size of…
The free propagation of acoustic plane waves through cellular periodic materials is generally accompanied by a flow of mechanical energy across the adjacent cells. The paper focuses on the energy transport related to dispersive waves…
In this paper, we bring together our efforts in identifying and understanding nonequilibrium phase segregation driven by active processes in the living cell, with special focus on the segregation of cell membrane components driven by active…
Tissue remodelling in diverse developmental contexts require cell shape changes that have been associated with pulsation and flow of the actomyosin cytoskeleton. Here we describe the dynamics of the actomyosin cytoskeleton as a confined…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
Understanding the complex patterns in space-time exhibited by active systems has been the subject of much interest in recent times. Complementing this forward problem is the inverse problem of controlling active matter. Here we use optimal…