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Cells attach to their environment by means of focal adhesions, which are molecular complexes that exhibit the remarkable ability to adapt to mechanical load by changing their size. Drawing from the biomolecular mechanisms underlying this…
The study of organoids, artificially grown cell aggregates with the functionality and small-scale anatomy of real organs, is one of the most active areas of research in biology and biophysics, yet the basic physical origins of their…
The actin cortex is a thin layer of actin, myosin, and actin binding proteins that underlies the membrane of most animal cells. It is highly dynamic and can undergo remodelling on time-scales of tens of seconds thanks to protein turnover…
Urban systems are composed by complex couplings of several components, and more particularly between the built environment and transportation networks. Their interaction is involved in the emergence of the urban form. We propose in this…
A quantitative understanding of how cells interact with their extracellular matrix via molecular bonds is fundamental for many important processes in cell biology and engineering. In these interactions, the deformability of cells and matrix…
We present a fiber-distributed model of the reinforcing collagen of the human cornea. The model describes the basic connections between the components of the tissue by defining an elementary block (cell) and upscaling it to the physical…
Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…
Cardiovascular networks span the body by branching across many generations of vessels. The resulting structure delivers blood over long distances to supply all cells with oxygen via the relatively short-range process of diffusion at the…
Cellular rearrangements, as primary sources of tissue fluidization, facilitate topological transitions during tissue morphogenesis. We study the role of intrinsic cell properties such as cell polarity and cell-cell adhesion in shaping…
The impact of confinement on self-assembly of particles interacting with short-range attraction and long-range repulsion (SALR) potential is studied for thermodynamic states corresponding to local ordering of clusters or layers in the bulk.…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the mechanical relaxation of cells within a curved epithelial tissue layer represented by an arbitrary curve in two-dimensional space. This model generalises previous one-dimensional models…
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…
The present work presents a density-functional microscopic model of soft biological tissue. The model was based on a prototype molecular structure from experimentally resolved collagen peptide residues and water clusters and has the…
An imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure will lead to a change in body weight (mass) and body composition (fat and lean masses). A quantitative understanding of the processes involved, which currently remains lacking, will…
A multiphasic constitutive model of the skin that implicitly accounts for the process of intrinsic (i.e.\ chronological) ageing via variation of the constitutive parameters is proposed. The structurally-motivated constitutive formulation…