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The directed migration of cells toward stiffer substrate regions or durotaxis is relevant to tissue development and tumor progression. Here, we introduce a phenomenological model for single cell durotaxis that incorporates both elastic…
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…
Cellular contractility, migration, and extracellular matrix (ECM) mechanics are critical for a wide range of biological processes including embryonic development, wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and regeneration. Even though the…
We review the mathematical formalism underlying the modelling of stochasticity in biological systems. Beginning with a description of the system in terms of its basic constituents, we derive the mesoscopic equations governing the dynamics…
Multicellular tissues are the building blocks of many biological systems and organs. These tissues are not static, but dynamically change over time. Even if the overall structure remains the same there is a turnover of cells within the…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
We investigate the oscillatory dynamics and bifurcation structure of a reaction-diffusion system with bistable nonlinearity and mass conservation, which was proposed by [Otsuji et al, PLoS Comp. Biol. 3 (2007), e108]. The system is a useful…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
Bacterial motility, and in particular repulsion or attraction towards specific chemicals, has been a subject of investigation for over 100 years, resulting in detailed understanding of bacterial chemotaxis and the corresponding sensory…
The dynamics of single cell migration on flat surfaces is usually modeled by a Langevin-like problem consisting of ballistic motion for short periods and random walk. for long periods. Conversely, recent studies have revealed a previously…
Many cell types display random motility on two-dimensional substrates, but crawl persistently in a single direction when confined in a microchannel or on an adhesive micropattern. Does this imply that the motility mechanism of confined…
Cued and un-cued cell polarization is a fundamental mechanism in cell biology. As an alternative to the classical Turing bifurcation, it has been proposed that the cell polarity might onset by means of the well-known phenomenon of…
A combination of cellular contractility and active phase separation in cell-matrix composites is thought to be an enabler of spatiotemporal patterning in multicellular tissues across scales, from somitogenesis to cartilage condensation. To…
We demonstrate that active rotations in chemically signalling particles, such as autochemotactic {\it E. coli} close to walls, create a route for pattern formation based on a nonlinear yet deterministic instability mechanism. For slow…
Eukaryotic cells possess motility mechanisms allowing them not only to self-propel but also to exert forces on obstacles (to push) and to carry cargoes (to pull). To study the inherent asymmetry between active pushing and pulling we model a…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…
We develop a simple computational model for cell boundary evolution in plastic deformation. We study the cell boundary size distribution and cell boundary misorientation distribution that experimentally have been found to have scaling forms…
We investigate numerically the dynamics of shape and displacement fluctuations of two-dimensional flexible vesicles filled with active particles. At low concentration most of the active particles accumulate at the boundary of the vesicle…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…