Related papers: Physical limits to biomechanical sensing
Tuning of active prestress e.g. through activity of molecular motors constitutes a powerful cellular tool to adjust cellular stiffness through nonlinear material properties. Understanding this tool is an important prerequisite for our…
Cells are dynamic systems characterized by temporal variations in biophysical properties such as stiffness and contractility. Recent studies show that the recruitment and release of actin filaments into and out of the cell cortex - a…
Biological cells are built up from many different constituents of varying size and stiffness which all contribute to the cell's mechanical properties. Despite this heterogeneity, in the analysis of experimental measurements such as atomic…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Previous research on semiflexible polymers including cytoskeletal networks in cells has suggested the existence of distinct regimes of elastic response, in which the strain field is either uniform (affine) or non-uniform (non-affine) under…
Contractile forces exerted on the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM) lead to the alignment and stretching of constituent fibers within the vicinity of cells. As a consequence, the matrix reorganizes to form thick bundles of aligned…
Disordered hyperuniform heterogeneous materials are new, exotic amorphous states of matter that behave like crystals in the manner in which they suppress volume-fraction fluctuations at large length scales, and yet are statistically…
Entangled networks of stiff biopolymers exhibit complex dynamic response, emerging from the topological constraints that neighboring filaments impose upon each other. We propose a class of reference models for entanglement dynamics of stiff…
In fibrous paper materials, an exposure to a variation in moisture content causes changes in the geometrical and mechanical properties. Such changes are strongly affected by the inter-fibre bonds, which are responsible for the transfer of…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
Migrating cells choose their preferential direction of motion in response to different signals and stimuli sensed by spanning their external environment. However, the presence of dense fibrous regions, lack of proper substrate, and cell…
Cellular elastomeric metamaterials are interesting for various applications, e.g. soft robotics, as they may exhibit multiple microstructural pattern transformations, each with its characteristic mechanical behavior. Numerical literature…
The mechanical properties of a disordered heterogeneous medium depend, in general, on a complex interplay between multiple length scales. Connecting local interactions to macroscopic observables, such as stiffness or fracture, is thus…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
The rigidity of elastic networks depends sensitively on their internal connectivity and the nature of the interactions between constituents. Particles interacting via central forces undergo a zero-temperature rigidity-percolation transition…
Soft living tissues like cartilage can be considered as biphasic materials comprised of a fibrous complex biopolymer network and a viscous background liquid. Here, we show by a combination of experiment and theoretical analysis that both…
In this paper we develop a new perspective on generalization of neural networks by proposing and investigating the concept of a neural network stiffness. We measure how stiff a network is by looking at how a small gradient step in the…
In this paper homogenization of a mathematical model for biomechanics of a plant tissue with randomly distributed cells is considered. Mechanical properties of a plant tissue are modelled by a strongly coupled system of…
Cells can sense and respond to mechanical signals over relatively long distances across fibrous extracellular matrices. Here, we explore all of the key factors that influence long range force transmission in cell-populated collagen…
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…