Related papers: Universal geometric constraints during epithelial …

Epithelial morphogenesis, a signature problem of tissue biology and tissue mechanics, continues to inspire biologists and physicists alike. Many treatments focus on tissue fluidization, apical/basal ratio changes, or mechanical…

Many intracellular processes continue to oscillate during the cell cycle. Although it is not well-understood how they are affected by discontinuities in the cellular environment, the general assumption is that oscillations remain robust…

Cells and tissues change shape both to carry out their function and during pathology. In most cases, these deformations are driven from within the systems themselves. This is permitted by a range of molecular actors, such as active…

Morphogenesis, tissue regeneration and cancer invasion involve transitions in tissue morphology. These transitions, caused by collective cell migration (CCM), have been interpreted as active wetting/de-wetting transitions. This phenomenon…

The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains…

Interfaces between stratified epithelia and their supporting stromas commonly exhibit irregular shapes. Undulations are particularly pronounced in dysplastic tissues and typically evolve into long, finger-like protrusions in carcinomas. In…

Ordered polarity alignment of a cell population plays a vital role in biology, such as in hair follicle alignment and asymmetric cell division. Here, we propose a theoretical framework for the understanding of generic dynamical properties…

Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…

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…

While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…

Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…

Eukaryotic cells intrinsically change their shape, by changing the composition of their membrane and by restructuring their underlying cytoskeleton. We present here further studies and extensions of a minimal physical model, describing a…

Gradual transformation of the epidermal stem cells to corneocytes involves a chain of chronologically well-arranged events that mostly stimulated locally by their neighbors. Cell diversity that observed during the differentiation through…

There are two main classes of physics-based models for two-dimensional cellular materials: packings of repulsive disks and the vertex model. These models have several disadvantages. For example, disk interactions are typically a function of…

Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…

Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we…

A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…

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…

In this article, we propose a general framework to study the dynamics and topology of cellular networks that capture the geometry of cell packings in two-dimensional tissues. Such epithelia undergo large-scale deformation during…

Epithelial tissues form physically integrated barriers against the external environment protecting organs from infection and invasion. Within each tissue, epithelial cells respond to different challenges that can potentially compromise…