Related papers: Defect driven shapes in nematic droplets: analogie…
The kinetics of droplet and bridge formation within striped nano-capillaries is studied when the wetting film grows via interface-limited growth. The phenomenological time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL)-type model with thermal noise is…
Cells coexist together in colonies or as tissues. Their behaviour is controlled by an interplay between intercellular forces and biochemical regulation. We develop a simple model of the cell cycle, the fundamental regulatory network…
Morphogenesis of living systems involves topological shape transformations which are highly unusual in the inanimate world. Here we demonstrate that a droplet of a nematic liquid crystal changes its equilibrium shape from a simply-connected…
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth in understanding of the pivotal roles of mechanical stresses and physical forces in cell biology. As a result an integrated view of cell biology is evolving, where genetic and molecular features…
Lipid membranes form the barrier between the inside and outside of cells and many of their subcompartments. As such, they bind to a wide variety of nano- and micrometer sized objects and, in the presence of strong adhesive forces, strongly…
The transport and deformation of confined droplets and flexible capsules are central to diverse phenomena and applications, from biological flows in microcapillaries to industrial processes in porous media. Inspired by experiments, we…
Active nematics are the nonequilibrium analog of passive liquid crystals in which anisotropic units consume free energy to drive emergent behavior. Similar to liquid crystal (LC) molecules in displays, ordering and dynamics in active…
Recently, it was observed that water droplets suspended in a nematic liquid crystal form linear chains (Poulin et al., Science 275, 1770 (1997)). The chaining occurs, e.g., in a large nematic drop with homeotropic boundary conditions at all…
Droplet breakup is a well studied phenomena in Newtonian fluids. One property of this behavior is that, independent of initial conditions, the minimum radius exhibits power law scaling with the time left to breakup tau. Because they have…
We demonstrate scaffolding of plasmonic nanoparticles by topological defects induced by colloidal microspheres to match their surface boundary conditions with a uniform far-field alignment in a liquid crystal host. Displacing energetically…
Defects in liquid crystals are of great practical importance and theoretical interest. Despite tremendous efforts, predicting the location and transition of defects under various topological constraint and external field remains to be a…
A simple model of an active colloid consisting of dumbbell-shaped particles that cyclically change their length without propelling themselves is proposed and analyzed. At nanoscales, it represents an idealization for bacterial cytoplasm or…
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very…
Precise positioning of the mitotic spindle is important for specifying the plane of cell division, which in turn determines how the cytoplasmic contents are partitioned into the daughter cells, and how the daughters are positioned within…
To insight the relationships between the self-organizing structures of cells, such as the cell clusters, and the properties of biotissues is helpful in revealing the function and designing biomaterial. Traditional random foam model neglects…
Active nematic fluids confined in narrow channels generate spontaneous flows when the activity is sufficiently intense. Recently, it was shown that if the molecular anchoring at the channel walls is conflicting flows are initiated even in…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
Using a version of density-functional theory which combines Onsager approximation and fundamental-measure theory for spatially nonuniform phases, we have studied the phase diagram of freely rotating hard rectangles and hard discorectangles.…
We investigate the defect structures forming around two nanoparticles in a Gay-Berne nematic liquid crystal using molecular simulations. For small separations, disclinations entangle both particles forming the figure of eight, the figure of…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…