Related papers: Tissue fusion over non-adhering surfaces
On the basis of a previous theoretical approach to the plastic flow of highly refined materials, a physical explanation for diffusion bonding is essayed, which yields closed--form equations relating the bonding progress with time,…
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…
Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…
When cell sheets fold during development, their apical or basal surfaces constrict and cell shapes approach the geometric singularity in which these surfaces vanish. Here, we reveal the mechanical consequences of this geometric singularity…
Self-consistent field theory is used to determine structural and energetic properties of metastable intermediates and unstable transition states involved in the standard stalk mechanism of bilayer membrane fusion. A microscopic model of…
Collective cell flows are a hallmark of tissue dynamics in development, wound healing, and various diseases. Here, we perform experiments on epithelial MDCK cell monolayers, over tens of hours without jamming, on millimeter-scale…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
In processes such as embryo shaping, wound healing, and malignant cell invasion, epithelial cells transition between dispersed phases, where the cells move independently, and condensed phases, where they aggregate and deform to close gaps,…
Tissue surface tension influences cell sorting and tissue fusion. Earlier mechanical studies suggest that multicellular spheroids actively reinforce their surface tension with applied force. Here we study this open question through…
Surface tension governed by differential adhesion can drive fluid particle mixtures to sort into separate regions, i.e., demix. Does the same phenomenon occur in confluent biological tissues? We begin to answer this question for epithelial…
Fusion of lipid bilayers in membranes is important in processes from vesicle-cell interactions (as in drug delivery) to exosome-cell signaling, while transient transmembrane electric fields are known to occur spontaneously. Two contacting…
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…
Cross-sections of cell shapes in a tissue monolayer typically resemble a tiling of convex polygons. Yet, examples exist where the polygons are not convex with curved cell-cell interfaces, as seen in the adaxial epidermis. To date,…
Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…
Cell invasion and spatial pattern formation are two distinct manifestations of cellular self-organisation in development, regeneration, and disease. Here, we develop and analyse a unified theoretical framework that links these two seemingly…
We study theoretically the closure of a wound in a layer of epithelial cells in a living tissue after damage. Our analysis is informed by our recent experiments observing re-epithelialisation in vivo of Drosophila pupae. On time and…
Epithelial tissues form physically integrated barriers against the external environment protecting organs from infection and invasion. Within each tissue, epithelial cells respond to different challenges that can potentially compromise…
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.…
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…