Related papers: Soft yet sharp interfaces in a vertex model of con…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
During growth, tissue expands and deforms. Given its elastic properties, stresses emerge in an expanding and deforming tissue. Cell rearrangements can dissipate these stresses and numerous experiments confirm the viscoelastic properties of…
Recent experiments have shown that surface stresses in soft materials can have a significant strain-dependence. Here we explore the implications of this surface elasticity to show how, and when, we expect it to arise. We develop the…
We introduce two 2D mechanical models reproducing the evolution of two viscous tissues in contact. Their main property is to model the swirling cell motions while keeping the tissues segregated, as observed during vertebrate embryo…
In this paper we present an individual-based mechanical model that describes the dynamics of two contiguous cell populations with different proliferative and mechanical characteristics. An off-lattice modelling approach is considered…
Understanding the rheological properties of soft biological tissue is a key issue for mechanical systems used in the healthcare field. We propose a simple empirical model using Fractional Dynamics and Exponential Nonlinearity (FDEN) to…
Motivated by studies suggesting that the patterns exhibited by the collectively expanding fronts of thin cells during the closing of a wound [Mark et al., Biophys. J., 98:361-370, 2010] and the shapes of single cells crawling on surfaces…
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…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
A molecular-dynamics type simulation method, which is suitable for investigating the dewetting dynamics of thin and viscous liquid layers, is discussed. The efficiency of the method is exemplified by studying a two-parameter depinning-like…
An important open question in the modeling of biological tissues is how to identify the right scale for coarse-graining, or equivalently, the right number of degrees of freedom. For confluent biological tissues, both vertex and Voronoi…
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…
Discrete simulation methods are efficient tools to investigate the complex behaviors of complex fluids made of either dry granular materials or dilute suspensions. By contrast, materials made of soft and/or concentrated units (emulsions,…
The thin interface limit aims at minimizing the effects arising from a numerical interface thickness, inherent in diffuse interface models of solidification and microstructure evolution such as the phase field model. While the original…
Nearly all cell models explicitly or implicitly deal with the biophysical constraints that must be respected for life to persist. Despite this, there is almost no systematicity in how these constraints are implemented, and we lack a…
Cells actively probe and respond to the stiffness of their surroundings. Since mechanosensory cells in connective tissue are surrounded by a disordered network of biopolymers, their in vivo mechanical environment can be extremely…
We present a model for cell growth, division and packing under soft constraints that arise from the deformability of the cells as well as of a membrane that encloses them. Our treatment falls within the framework of diffuse interface…
The fundamental understanding of how cells physically interact with each other and their environment is key to understanding their organisation in living tissues. Over the past decades several computational methods have been developed to…
In these Lecture Notes we aim at clarifying how soft matter physics, and herein notably statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics, can be engaged to understand and manipulate non-equilibrium systems consisting of numerous (microscopic)…
The processes taking place inside the living cell are now understood to the point where predictive computational models can be used to gain detailed understanding of important biological phenomena. A key challenge is to extrapolate this…