Related papers: Crawling and turning in a minimal reaction-diffusi…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
Cells and organisms follow aligned structures in their environment, a process that can generate persistent migration paths. Kinetic transport equations are a popular modelling tool for describing biological movements at the mesoscopic…
Collective cell migration is a multicellular phenomenon that arises in various biological contexts, including cancer and embryo development. "Collectiveness" can be promoted by cell-cell interactions such as co-attraction and contact…
Eukaryotic cells possess a sensible chemical compass allowing them to orient toward sources of soluble chemicals. The extracellular chemical signal triggers separation of the cell membrane into two domains populated by different…
The combination of protrusions and retractions in the movement of polarized cells leads to understand the effect of possible synchronisation between the two ends of the cells. This synchronisation, in turn, could lead to different dynamics…
The bacterium E.Coli swims in a zig-zag manner, in a series of straight runs and tumbles occurring alternately, with the run-durations dependent on the local spatial gradient of chemo-attractants/repellants. This enables the organism to…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Many processes in eukaryotic cells, including cell motility, rely on the growth of branched actin networks from surfaces. Despite its central role the mechano-chemical coupling mechanisms which guide the growth process are poorly…
We perform an analytical investigation of the cell interface dynamics in the framework of a minimal phase field model of cell motility suggested in [1], which consists of two coupled evolution equations for the order parameter and a…
Numerous physical models have been proposed to explain how cell motility emerges from internal activity, mostly focused on how crawling motion arises from internal processes. Here we offer a classification of self-propulsion mechanisms…
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…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
Run-and-tumble motility is widely used by swimming microorganisms including numerous prokaryotic eukaryotic organisms. Here, we experimentally investigate the run-and-tumble dynamics of the bacterium E. coli in polymeric solutions. We find…
The migration behavior of colliding cells is critically determined by transient contact-interactions. During these interactions, the motility machinery, including the front-rear polarization of the cell, dynamically responds to surface…
Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
Metabolic scaling is one of the most important patterns in biology. Theory explaining the 3/4-power size-scaling of biological metabolic rate does not predict the non-linear scaling observed for smaller life forms. Here we present a new…
Cells often migrate on curved surfaces inside the body, such as curved tissues, blood vessels or highly curved protrusions of other cells. Recent \textit{in-vitro} experiments provide clear evidence that motile cells are affected by the…
The interaction of the actin cytoskeleton with cell-substrate adhesions is necessary for cell migration. While the trajectories of motile cells have a stochastic character, investigations of cell motility mechanisms rarely elaborate on the…