Related papers: Shape regulation generates elastic interaction bet…
The maintenance of tissue and organ structures during dynamic homeostasis is often not well understood. In order for a system to be stable, cell renewal, cell migration and cell death must be finely balanced. Moreover, a tissue's shape must…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
Self-regulation of living tissue as an example of self-organization phenomena in active fractal systems of biological, ecological, and social nature is under consideration. The characteristic feature of these systems is the absence of any…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…
A hallmark of biological tissues, viewed as complex cellular materials, is the active generation of mechanical stresses by cellular processes, such as cell divisions. Each cellular event generates a force dipole that deforms the surrounding…
Voltage and charge distributions in cellular microdomains regulate communications, excitability, and signal transduction. We report here new electrical laws in a cell, which follow from a nonlinear electro-diffusion model. These newly…
Receptor-mediated endocytosis requires that the energy of adhesion overcomes the deformation energy of the plasma membrane. The resulting driving force is balanced by dissipative forces, leading to deterministic dynamical equations. While…
Cellular uptake of nanoplastics is instrumental in their environmental accumulation and transfer to humans through the food chain. Despite extensive studies using spherical plastic nanoparticles, the influence of the morphological…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
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…
We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
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…
Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…
The macroscopic behaviour of active matter arises from nonequilibrium microscopic processes. In soft materials, active stresses typically drive macroscopic shape changes, which in turn alter the geometry constraining the microscopic…