Related papers: On cell surface deformation during an action poten…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
Interactions between crawling cells, which are essential for many biological processes, can be quantified by measuring cell-cell collisions. Conventionally, experiments of cell-cell collisions are conducted on two-dimensional flat…
Vertex Models, as used to describe cellular tissue, have an energy controlled by deviations of each cell area and perimeter from target values. The constrained nonlinear relation between area and perimeter leads to new mechanical response.…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
Recent experiments suggest that the interplay between cells and the mechanics of their substrate gives rise to a diversity of morphological and migrational behaviors. Here, we develop a Cellular Potts Model of polarizing cells on a…
Living cells employ excitable reaction-diffusion waves for internal cellular functions, in which curvature-inducing proteins are often involved. However, the role of their mechanochemical coupling is not well understood. Here, we report the…
A continuum model of epithelial tissue mechanics was formulated using cellular-level mechanical ingredients and cell morphogenetic processes, including cellular shape changes and cellular rearrangements. This model can include finite…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level…
Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions such as proliferation, motility, and cell death, and such cellular systems are…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…
The motion of a eukaryotic cell presents a variety of interesting and challenging problems from both a modeling and a computational perspective. The processes span many spatial scales (from molecular to tissue) as well as disparate time…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
The morphogenesis of cells and tissues involves an interplay between chemical signals and active forces on their surrounding surface layers. The complex interaction of hydrodynamics and material flows on such active surfaces leads to…
Giant unilamellar vesicles subjected to pulsed direct-current (pulsed-DC) fields are promising biomimetic systems to investigate the electroporation of cells. In strong electric fields, vesicles undergo significant deformation, which…
Coordinated motion of cell monolayers during epithelial wound healing and tissue morphogenesis involves mechanical stress generation. Here we propose a model for the dynamics of epithelial expansion that couples mechanical deformations in…
We study the transient dynamics of a viscous liquid contained in a narrow gap between a rigid surface and a parallel elastic plate. The elastic plate is deformed due to an externally applied time-varying pressure-field. We model the…
Synchronization of activity among myocytes constituting vital organs, e.g., the heart, is crucial for physiological functions. Self-organized coordination in such heterogeneous ensemble of excitable and oscillatory cells is therefore of…
Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…