Related papers: Simple mechanical cues could explain adipose tissu…

The collective action of actively contractile units embedded in elastic biopolymer networks plays a crucial role in regulating the network's macroscopic mechanical response. Here, we investigate how the macroscopic boundary stress in model…

Convergent extension of epithelial tissue is a key motif of animal morphogenesis. On a coarse scale, cell motion resembles laminar fluid flow; yet in contrast to a fluid, epithelial cells adhere to each other and maintain the tissue layer…

Collective cell migration plays a central role in tissue development, morphogenesis, wound repair and cancer progression. With the growing realization that physical forces mediate cell motility in development and physiology, a key…

Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…

Despite their topological complexity almost all functional properties of metabolic networks can be derived from steady-state dynamics. Indeed, many theoretical investigations (like flux-balance analysis) rely on extracting function from…

The multiplicative decomposition model is widely employed for predicting residual stresses and morphologies of biological tissues due to growth. However, it relies on the assumption that the tissue is initially in a stress-free state, which…

Biological cells are built up from many different constituents of varying size and stiffness which all contribute to the cell's mechanical properties. Despite this heterogeneity, in the analysis of experimental measurements such as atomic…

In contrast with ordinary materials, living matter drives its own motion by generating active, out-of-equilibrium internal stresses. These stresses typically originate from localized active elements embedded in an elastic medium, such as…

The colonisation of a soft passive material by motile cells such as bacteria is common in biology. The resulting colonies of the invading cells are often observed to exhibit intricate patterns whose morphology and dynamics can depend on a…

Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…

Modularity structures are common in various social and biological networks. However, its dynamical origin remains an open question. In this work, we set up a dynamical model describing the evolution of a social network. Based on the…

The response of cells during spreading and motility is dictated by several multi-physics events, which are triggered by extracellular cues and occur at different time-scales. For this sake, it is not completely appropriate to provide a cell…

In complex systems, groups of interacting objects may form prevalent and persistent spatiotemporal patterns, which we refer to as motifs. These motifs can exhibit features that reveal how individual objects interact with one another.…

Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…

Biomolecular structures are assemblies of emergent anisotropic building modules such as uniaxial helices or biaxial strands. We provide an approach to understanding a marginally compact phase of matter that is occupied by proteins and DNA.…

Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…

Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…

Breast cancer invasion into adipose tissue strongly influences disease progression and metastasis. The degree of cancer cell invasion into adipose tissue depends on numerous biochemical and physical properties of cancer cells, adipocytes,…

Biological processes, from morphogenesis to tumor invasion, spontaneously generate shear stresses inside living tissue. The mechanisms that govern the transmission of mechanical forces in epithelia and the collective response of the tissue…

Phase-separated biomolecular condensates with liquid-like properties play a key role in the organization and compartmentalization of the intracellular environment. Condensate-mediated capillary forces acting on membranes drive…