Related papers: On cell surface deformation during an action poten…
Electric pulses in biological cells (action potentials) have been reported to be accompanied by a propagating cell-surface deformation with a nano-scale amplitude. Typically, this cell surface is covered by external layers of polymer…
It is a common incident in nature, that two waves or pulses run into each other head-on. The outcome of such an event is of special interest, because it allows conclusions about the underlying physical nature of the pulses. The present…
This paper is devoted to studies of the mechanical deformation of the S. aureus cell wall. The bacterium is modelled as a thin elastic membrane containing cytoplasm, which is treated as an incompressible fluid. Deformation occurs via Van…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
Blood leukocytes can exhibit extensive morphological changes during their passage through small capillary vessels. The human monocytic THP-1 cell line was used to explore the metabolic dependence of these shape changes. Cells were aspirated…
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…
Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…
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…
Cell membranes are studded with protrusions that were thoroughly analyzed with electron microscopy. However, the nanometer-scale three-dimensional motions generated by cell membranes to fit the topography of foreign surfaces and initiate…
The conditions under which biological cells switch from a static to a motile state are fundamental to the understanding of many healthy and pathological processes. In this paper, we show that even in the presence of a fully symmetric…
Biologically inspired pressure actuated cellular structures can alter their shape through pressure variations. Previous work introduced a computational framework for pressure actuated cellular structures which was limited to two cell rows…
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating the motility of…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…
The organization of live cells to tissues is associated with the mechanical interaction between cells, which is mediated through their elastic environment. We model cells as spherical active force dipoles surrounded by an infinite elastic…
We study interactions between biological cells that apply anisotropic active mechanical forces on an elastic substrate. We model the cells as thin discs that along their perimeters apply radial, but angle-dependent forces on the substrate.…
Tissue surface tension influences cell sorting and tissue fusion. Earlier mechanical studies suggest that multicellular spheroids actively reinforce their surface tension with applied force. Here we study this open question through…
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…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…
Many embryonic deformations during development are the global result of local cell shape changes and other local active cell sheet deformations. Morphogenesis does not only therefore rely on the ability of the tissue to produce these active…