Related papers: Fluidization and Active Thinning by Molecular Kine…

We introduce a phenomenological model to study the properties of bundles of polar filaments which interact via active elements. The stability of the homogeneous state, the attractors of the dynamics in the unstable regime and the tensile…

The dynamics of active viscoelastic surfaces plays an important role in biological systems. One prominent example is the actin cortex, a thin bio-polymer sheet underneath the outer membrane of biological cells which combines active…

We derive the full set of macroscopic equations necessary to describe the dynamics of systems with active polar order in a viscoelastic or elastic background. The active polar order is manifested by a second velocity, whose non-zero modulus…

Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…

Active matter locally converts chemical energy into mechanical work and, for this reason, it provides new mechanisms of pattern formation. In particular, active gels made of protein motors and filaments are far-from-equilibrium systems that…

Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…

Using active gel theory we study theoretically the properties of the cortical actin layer of animal cells. The cortical layer is described as a non-equilibrium wetting film on the cell membrane. The actin density is approximately constant…

The Starling principle describes exchanges in tissues based on the balance of hydrostatic and osmotic flows. This balance neglects the coupling between mechanics and hydrodynamics, a questionable assumption in strained elastic tissues due…

The physical gelation of colloids produces elastic structures that are commonly used to stabilize complex fluids in multiple industries. However, the ability to control the level of elastic modulus of these materials is limited by the…

Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…

The production of mechanical stresses in living organisms largely relies on localized, force-generating active units embedded in filamentous matrices. Numerical simulations of discrete fiber networks with fixed boundaries have shown that…

The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…

The collective behaviour of confluent cell sheets is strongly influenced both by polar forces, arising through cytoskeletal propulsion and by active inter-cellular forces, which are mediated by interactions across cell-cell junctions. We…

In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…

Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…

External fields can decidedly alter the free energy landscape of soft materials and can be exploited as a powerful tool for the assembly of targeted nanostructures and colloidal materials. Here, we use computer simulations to demonstrate…

In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…

We propose and analyze a mathematical model of the mechanics of gels, consisting of the laws of balance of mass and linear momentum. We consider a gel to be an immiscible and incompressible mixture of a nonlinearly elastic polymer and a…

We study theoretically the phase diagram of compressible active polar gels such as the actin network of eukaryotic cells. Using generalized hydrodynamics equations, we perform a linear stability analysis of the uniform states in the case of…

The actin cytoskeleton in living cells generates forces in conjunction with myosin motor proteins to directly and indirectly drive essential cellular processes. The semiflexible filaments of the cytoskeleton can respond nonlinearly to the…