Related papers: Giant fluctuations and structural effects in a flo…
The clustering of self-motile and repulsive particles, so-called motility-induced phase separation (MIPS), is one of the clearest signatures of active physics. Typically, increasing the amplitude of self-motility increases the degree of…
There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…
Epithelial cells can assemble into cohesive colonies and collectively interact with substrates by generating extracellular forces through focal adhesions. Recently, a molecularly based thermodynamic model, which integrates both the…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Motility initiation in crawling cells requires transformation of a symmetric state into a polarized state. In contrast, motility arrest is associated with re-symmetrization of the internal configuration of a cell. Experiments on keratocytes…
We study the deformation of a fluctuating crystalline sheet confined between two flat rigid walls as a simple model for layered solids where bonds among atoms {\it within} the same layer are much stronger than those {\it between} layers.…
Cell shape is fundamental in biology. The average cell shape can influence crucial biological functions, such as cell fate and division orientation. But cell-to-cell shape variability is often regarded as noise. In contrast, recent works…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
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…
We computationally study jammed disordered hard-sphere packings as large as a million particles. We show that the packings are saturated and hyperuniform, i.e., that local density fluctuations grow only as a logarithmically-augmented…
Key to collective cell migration is the ability of cells to rearrange their position with respect to their neighbors. Recent theory and experiments demonstrated that cellular rearrangements are facilitated by cell shape, with cells having…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…
Networks of strongly-coupled neurons with random connectivity exhibit chaotic, asynchronous fluctuations. In previous work, we showed that when endowed with an additional low-rank connectivity consisting of the outer product of orthogonal…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
We present results for the nonequilibrium dynamics of collapse for a model flexible homopolymer on simple cubic lattices with fixed and fluctuating bonds between the monomers. Results from our Monte Carlo simulations show that,…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
We study the coupling between the structural dynamics and rheological response of charged colloidal monolayers at water/oil interfaces, driven into steady shear by a microdisk rotating at a controlled angular velocity. The flow causes…
Topological defects are fundamental to the collective dynamics of non-equilibrium systems and in active matter, mediating spontaneous flows, dynamic self-organization, and emergent pattern formation. Here, we reveal critical states in…
One of the most challenging problems in microbiology is to understand how a small fraction of microbes that resists killing by antibiotics can emerge in a population of genetically identical cells, the phenomenon known as persistence or…
Colloidal 2D monolayers sliding in an optical lattice are of recent importance as a frictional system. In the general case when the monolayer and optical lattices are incommensurate, we predict two important novelties, one in the static…