Related papers: Defect-mediated morphologies in growing cell colon…

Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…

We investigate the dynamics of a colony of crawling, proliferating cells with a minimal, mechanical cell model. The cells consist of two disks, modelling the cell body and a pseudopod, connected by a finite extensible spring. The cells…

Colonies of rod-shaped bacteria constitute a system of colloidal active matter with nematic properties. As a single initial bacterium multiplies through repeated divisions, the resulting colony quickly loses long-range orientational order,…

Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…

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…

Growing experimental evidence indicates that topological defects could serve as organizing centers in the morphogenesis of tissues. Here, we provide a quantitative explanation for this phenomenon, rooted in the buckling theory of deformable…

Rod-shaped bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, commonly live forming mounded colonies. They initially grow two-dimensionally on a surface and finally achieve three-dimensional growth. While it was recently reported that three-dimensional…

The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus lives in densely packed groups that form dynamic three-dimensional patterns in response to environmental changes, such as droplet-like fruiting bodies during starvation. The development of these…

Topological defects in nematically aligned cell populations play a critical role in modulating collective motion, from microbial colonies to epithelial tissues. Despite the potential of manipulating such topological defects to control…

Recent studies have shown that packings of cells, both eukaryotic cellular tissues and growing or swarming bacterial colonies, can often be understood as active nematic fluids. A key property of volume-conserving active nematic model…

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…

There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…

In confluent cell monolayers, patterns of cell forces and motion are systematically altered near topological defects in cell shape. In turn, defects have been proposed to alter cell density, extrusion, and invasion, but it remains unclear…

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…

Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…

Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…

Droplets are essential for spatially controlling biomolecules in cells. To work properly, cells need to control the emergence and morphology of droplets. On the one hand, driven chemical reactions can affect droplets profoundly. For…

Inspired by recent experiments that highlight the role of nematic defects in the morphogenesis of epithelial tissues, we develop a minimal framework to study the dynamics of an active curved surface driven by its nematic texture. Allowing…

Collectively moving cellular systems often contain a proportion of dead cells or non-motile genotypes. When mixed, nematically aligning motile and non-motile agents are known to segregate spontaneously. However, the role that topological…

Controlling growth via cell division is crucial in the development of higher organisms, and yet the mechanisms through which this is achieved, e.g., in epithelial tissue, is not yet fully understood. We show that by coupling the cell cycle…