Related papers: Structure--property relationships of cell clusters…
Living cells establish long-range orientational order through collective alignment, giving rise to topological defects whose functional relevance is increasingly recognized in tissue organization and morphogenesis. Engineered topographical…
The rheological properties of biological tissues are core to processes such as cancer metastasis, wound healing and embryo development. The emergence of tissue and organ structures during morphogenesis requires the precise formation of…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
Titanium surface treated with titanium oxide nanotubes was used in many studies to quantify the effect of surface topography on cell fate. However, the predicted optimal diameter of nanotubes considerably differs among studies. We propose a…
Simple models for spherical particles with a soft shell have been shown to self-assemble into numerous crystal phases and even quasicrystals. However, most of these models rely on a simple pairwise interaction, which is usually a valid…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
A cell membrane can be simply regarded as composite material consisting of lipid bilayer, membrane cytoskeleton beneath lipid bilayer, and proteins embedded in lipid bilayer and linked with membrane cytoskeleton if one only concerns its…
We study gravitational clustering of mass points in three dimensions with random initial positions and periodic boundary conditions (no expansion) by numerical simulations. Correlation properties are well defined in the system and a sort of…
We incorporate the role of free volume in the density function of the amorphous structure and study its effects on the stability of such structures. The Density Functional Theory is used to explore this ``Free Volume Model'' of the…
The topology of large scale structure is studied as a function of galaxy type using the genus statistic. In hydrodynamical cosmological CDM simulations, galaxies form on caustic surfaces (Zeldovich pancakes) then slowly drain onto filaments…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…
We present a theoretical framework for new structural metamaterials we refer to as liquid structures: a topology of bistable mechanisms made up of a high number of cells that are sub-mechanisms composed of pseudo-rigid links and joints. The…
A constitutive relation between stress and strain relative to a reference state is the basic assumption of elasticity theory. However, in living matter, force generation is governed by motor molecule activity, which does not depend on…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
The elastic properties of two-component bilayer membranes are studied using a coarse grain model for amphiphilic molecules. The two species of amphiphiles considered here differ only in their length. Molecular Dynamics simulations are…
The biomolecules in and around a living cell -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates -- continuously sample myriad conformational states that are thermally accessible at physiological temperatures. Simultaneously, a given…
In this paper homogenization of a mathematical model for plant tissue biomechanics is presented. The microscopic model constitutes a strongly coupled system of reaction-diffusion-convection equations for chemical processes in plant cells,…
We present a theoretical framework based on an extension of dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) for describing the structure and dynamics of cells in living tissues and tumours. DDFT is a microscopic statistical mechanical theory for…
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,…