Related papers: Relating cell shape and mechanical stress in a spa…
Lipid membranes, fundamental to cellular function, undergo various mechanical deformations. Accurate modeling of these processes necessitates a thorough understanding of membrane elasticity. The lateral shear modulus, a critical parameter…
During development and under normal physiological conditions, biological tissues are continuously subjected to substantial mechanical stresses. In response to large deformations cells in a tissue must undergo multicellular rearrangements in…
We study the elastic response of bilayer membranes with fixed projected area to both stretching and shape deformations. A surface tension is associated to each of these deformations. By using model amphiphilic membranes and computer…
Shapes of planar lipid monolayer domains at the air-water interface are theoretically and numerically investigated by minimizing the formation energy of the domains which consist of the surface energy, line tension energy, and dipole…
Quantifying the in-plane rheology of epithelial monolayers remains challenging due to the difficulty of imposing controlled shear. We introduce a self-driven, rheometer-like assay in which collective migration generates stationary shear…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Cells in an epithelial monolayer coordinate motion with their neighbors giving rise to collectively moving packs of sizes spanning multiple cell diameters. The physical mechanism controlling the pack size, however, remains unclear. A…
Recent experiments on monolayers of spindle-like cells plated on adhesive stripe-shaped domains have provided a convincing demonstration that certain types of collective phenomena in epithelia are well described by active nematic…
How cells with diverse morphologies and cytoskeletal architectures modulate their mechanical behaviors to drive robust collective motion within tissues is poorly understood. During wound repair within epithelial monolayers in vitro, cells…
Recent experiments suggest that the interplay between cells and the mechanics of their substrate gives rise to a diversity of morphological and migrational behaviors. Here, we develop a Cellular Potts Model of polarizing cells on a…
We propose a minimal mathematical model to explain long-range coordination of dynamics of multiple cells in epithelial spreading, which may be induced, under different conditions, by a chemical signal, or mechanical stress, or both. The…
Many types of motile cells perform durotaxis, namely, directed migration following gradients of substrate stiffness. Recent experiments have revealed that cell monolayers can migrate toward stiffer regions even when individual cells do not…
We consider a multiscale approach based on immersed methods for the efficient computational modeling of tissues composed of an elastic matrix (in two or three-dimensions) and a thin vascular structure (treated as a co-dimension two…
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…
The alignment of cell-cell junctions and associated cortical actomyosin across multiple cells to form supracellular cables in an epithelium is an example of the long range tissue organization that drives morphogenesis. Here we demonstrate…
Transitions from quiescence to collective migration in epithelia underlie wound healing and cancer invasion, yet their physical origin remains poorly understood. Here we show that quiescent epithelial monolayers store spatially contractile…
An adequate control of cell response in tissue engineering applications is of utmost importance to obtain products suitable to clinical practice. This paper is the first part of a series of two connected publications in which we study via…
Mechanical signaling plays a key role in biological processes like embryo development and cancer growth. One prominent way to probe mechanical properties of tissues is to study their response to externally applied forces. Using a…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Developing epithelial tissues coordinate cell proliferation and mechanical forces to achieve proper size and shape. As epithelial cells tightly adhere together to form the confluent tissue, the distribution of cell areas significantly…