Related papers: Simple mechanical cues could explain adipose tissu…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
During the development of an organism, cells must coordinate and organize to generate the correct shape, structure, and spatial patterns of tissues and organs, a process known as morphogenesis. The morphogenesis of embryonic tissues is…
Bacteria on surfaces exhibit collective behaviors, such as active turbulence and active stresses, which result from their motility, growth, and interactions with their local surroundings. However, interfacial deformations on soft surfaces…
Cells and tissues exert forces and can actively change shape. This strikingly autonomous behavior is powered by the cytoskeleton, which includes an active gel of actin filaments, crosslinks, and myosin molecular motors. Although individual…
Constancy of life vitally depends on the internalization of particles through biomembranes. Of particular interest, cellular uptake, including phagocytosis, receptor-mediated endocytosis, and membrane fusion, critically depends on the…
We consider a phase-separating mixture of active and passive fluids and explore morphological asymmetries of the emerging dominantly bicontinous dynamic emulsion. Two-dimensional numerical simulations reveal that the geometric and…
Many biological processes are supported by special molecules, called motor proteins or molecular motors, that transport cellular cargoes along linear protein filaments and can reversibly associate to their tracks. Stimulated by these…
Bone is mineralized tissue constituting the skeletal system, supporting and protecting body organs and tissues. At the molecular level, mineralized collagen fibril is the basic building block of bone tissue, and hence, understanding bone…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
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…
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…
The large-scale structural ingredients of the brain and neural connectomes have been identified in recent years. These are, similar to the features found in many other real networks: the arrangement of brain regions into modules and the…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
Different cell types aggregate and sort into hierarchical architectures during the formation of animal tissues. The resulting spatial organization depends (in part) on the strength of adhesion of one cell type to itself relative to other…
The actin cytoskeleton is a key component in the machinery of eukaryotic cells, and it selfassembles out of equilibrium into a wide variety of biologically crucial structures. While the molecular mechanisms involved are well characterized,…
Cell adhesion proteins are transmembrane proteins that bind cells to their environment. These proteins typically cluster into disk-shaped or linear structures. Here we show that such clustering patterns spontaneously emerge when the protein…
When a colloidal suspension is dried, capillary pressure may overwhelm repulsive electrostatic forces, assembling aggregates that are out of thermal equilibrium. This poorly understood process confers cohesive strength to many geological…
Recent experimental and theoretical studies suggest that crystallization and glass-like solidification are useful analogies for understanding cell ordering in confluent biological tissues. It remains unexplored how cellular ordering…
Collective behavior of proteins on biomembranes is usually studied within the spontaneous curvature model. Here we consider an alternative phenomenological approach, which accounts consistently for partial ordering of proteins as well as…
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…