Related papers: Structural characterization and statistical-mechan…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
We propose a two-scale model to resolve essential features of developmental tissue deformations. The model couples individual cellular behavior to the mechanics at tissue scale. This is realized by a multiphase-field model addressing the…
During embryonic development tissue morphogenesis and signaling are tightly coupled. It is therefore important to simulate both tissue morphogenesis and signaling simultaneously in in silico models of developmental processes. The resolution…
The vertex model is widely used to describe the dynamics of epithelial tissues, because of its simplicity and versatility and the direct inclusion of biophysical parameters. Here, it is shown that quite generally, when cells modify their…
Spatiotemporal patterns are common in biological systems. For electrically-coupled cells previous studies of pattern formation have mainly used external forcing as the main bifurcation parameter. The purpose of this paper is to show that…
We propose two toy-models to describe, predict, and interpret the wrinkles appearing on the surface of skin when it is sheared. With the first model, we account for the lines of greatest tension present in human skin by subjecting a layer…
The mechanical response of cellular materials with spinodal topologies is numerically and experimentally investigated. Spinodal microstructures are generated by the numerical solution of the Cahn-Hilliard equation. Two different topologies…
Convergence extension, the simultaneous elongation of tissue along one axis while narrowing along a perpendicular axis, occurs during embryonic development. A fundamental process that contributes to shaping the organism, it happens in many…
Stress and strain fields in a two-dimensional pixelwise disordered system are computed by a Fast Fourier Transform method. The system, a model for a ductile damaged medium, consists of an elastic-perfectly matrix containing void pixels. Its…
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…
Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…
We derive a continuum mechanical model to capture the morphological changes occurring at the pretumoral stage of epithelial tissues. The proposed model aims to investigate the competition between the bulk elasticity of the epithelium and…
Cell invasion and spatial pattern formation are two distinct manifestations of cellular self-organisation in development, regeneration, and disease. Here, we develop and analyse a unified theoretical framework that links these two seemingly…
The dominant paradigm in computational materials discovery relies on heavily parameterized deep architectures, including message-passing graph networks and equivariant models, that require millions of DFT-labeled training structures and…
Spatial organization of proteins in cells is important for many biological functions. In general, the nonlinear, spatially coupled models for protein-pattern formation are only accessible to numerical simulations, which has limited insight…
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…
Two-dimensional (2D) mechanical models of confluent tissues have related the mechanical state of a monolayer of cells to the average perimeter length of the cell cross sections, predicting floppiness or rigidity of the material. For the…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
We propose a three dimensional mechanical model of embryonic tissue dynamics. Mechanically coupled adherent cells are represented as particles interconnected with elastic beams which can exert non-central forces and torques. Tissue…
Epithelial cell monolayers show remarkable displacement and velocity correlations over distances of ten or more cell sizes that are reminiscent of supercooled liquids and active nematics. We show that many observed features can be described…