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Cells and tissues exert forces and can actively change shape. This strikingly autonomous behavior is powered by the cytoskeleton, which includes an active gel of actin filaments, crosslinks, and myosin molecular motors. Although individual…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Hydrogels of semiflexible biopolymers such as collagen have been shown to contract axially under shear strain, in contrast to the axial dilation observed for most elastic materials. Recent work has shown that this behavior can be understood…
Chemo-mechanical waves on active deformable surfaces are a key component for many vital cellular functions. In particular, these waves play a major role in force generation and long-range signal transmission in cells that dynamically change…
The cellular cytoskeleton is an active material, driven out of equilibrium by molecular motor proteins. It is not understood how the collective behaviors of cytoskeletal networks emerge from the properties of the network's constituent motor…
Cells make use of semi-flexible biopolymers such as actin or intermediate filaments to control their local viscoelastic response by dynamically adjusting the concentration and type of cross-linker molecules. The microstructure of the…
A numerical hydrodynamic study of femtosecond laser ablation is presented. A detailed analysis of material decomposition is performed using a thermodynamically complete equation of state with separate stable and metastable phase states and…
Collective cell migration is a highly regulated process involved in wound healing, cancer metastasis and morphogenesis. Mechanical interactions among cells provide an important regulatory mechanism to coordinate such collective motion.…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
A number of factors, such as, cell-cell interactions and self-propulsion of cells driven by cytoskeletal forces determine tissue morphologies and dynamics. To explore the interplay between these factors in controlling the dynamics at the…
As exposure to electromagnetic waves becomes increasingly widespread, it is important to quantify how incident fields couple into biological tissue and where absorbed energy is deposited. This work presents an analytical, physics based…
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…
In living matter, shape fluctuations induced by acto-myosin are usually studied in vitro via reconstituted gels, whose properties are controlled by changing the concentrations of actin, myosin and cross-linkers. Such an approach…
Tissue boundaries pattern embryos, suppress tumours, and provide directional cues. Tissue boundaries are associated with supracellular cables formed by actin and the molecular motor non-muscle myosin II. Actomyosin cables generate tension…
Brain organoids recapitulate a number of brain properties, including neuronal diversity. However, do they recapitulate brain structure? Using a hydrodynamic description for cell nuclei as particles interacting initially via an effective,…
Observations of single epidermal cells on flat adhesive substrates have revealed two distinct morphological and functional states, namely a non-migrating symmetric unpolarized state and a migrating asymmetric polarized state. These states…
We investigate the geometrical and mechanical properties of adherent cells characterized by a highly anisotropic actin cytoskeleton. Using a combination of theoretical work and experiments on micropillar arrays, we demonstrate that the…
Mitochondrial networks exhibit a variety of complex behaviors, including coordinated cell-wide oscillations of energy states as well as a phase transition (depolarization) in response to oxidative stress. Since functional and structural…
Centering and decentering of cellular components is essential for internal organization of cells and their ability to perform basic cellular functions such as division and motility. How cells achieve proper localization of their components…
We perform a bidimensional Stokes experiment in an active cellular material: an autonomously migrating monolayer of Madin-Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) epithelial cells flows around a circular obstacle within a long and narrow channel,…