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We use experiments to study the dynamics of the healing of a blister, a localized bump in a thin elastic layer that is adhered to a soft substrate everywhere except at the bump. We create a blister by gently placing a glass cover slip on a…
In jamming systems like colloids, emulsions, foams, and biological tissues, significant deformation is essential for processes such as material scraping or wound self-healing. To adequately spread a foam or cream over a surface, external…
Large scale motion of cytoplasm called cytoplasmic streaming occurs in some large eukaryotic cells to stir the cell's constituents. In Drosophila oocytes, microtubules have been observed to undergo undulating motion, curving to form…
Here we show that coupling to curvature has profound effects on collective motion in active systems, leading to patterns not observed in flat space. Biological examples of such active motion in curved environments are numerous: curvature…
Slime mould plasmodia can adjust their behaviour in response to chemical trails left by themselves and other Physarum plasmodia. This simple feedback process increases their foraging efficiency. We still do not know whether other factors…
A qualitative model is presented, suggesting gravitational information is transduced into biological systems primarily by its effect on spatially organised membrane and cytoplasmic flows. Continuous low affinity interactions between…
Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…
In this work we study and expand a model describing the dynamics of a unicellular slime mold, Physarum Polycephalum (PP), which was proposed to simulate the ability of PP to find the shortest path connecting two food sources in a maze. The…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Plasmodium of \emph{Physarum polycephalum} is a single cell visible by unaided eye. On a non-nutrient substrate the plasmodium propagates as a traveling localization, as a compact wave-fragment of protoplasm. The plasmodium-localization…
The shell map is a very simple representation of the structure of foams, combining the geometrical (random tiling) and dynamical (loss of information from an arbitrary cell out) aspects of disorder. The structure is built from the central…
Interdependent networks are characterized by two kinds of interactions: The usual connectivity links within each network and the dependency links coupling nodes of different networks. Due to the latter links such networks are known to…
The mycelium of a filamentous fungus is a growing, branching network of numerous entangled hyphae exhibiting polarised apical growth. Expansion occurs during the vegetative phase from a single ascospore, driven by the need to explore and…
The human organism is an integrated network where complex physiologic systems, each with its own regulatory mechanisms, continuously interact, and where failure of one system can trigger a breakdown of the entire network. Identifying and…
Slime mould of Physarum polycephalum is a large cell exhibiting rich spatial non-linear electrical characteristics. We exploit the electrical properties of the slime mould to implement logic gates using a flexible hardware platform designed…
Blebs are balloon-shaped membrane protrusions that form during many physiological processes. Using computer simulation of a particle-based model for self-assembled lipid bilayers coupled to an elastic meshwork, we investigated the phase…
Epithelization, the process whereby an epithelium covers a cell-free surface, is not only central to wound healing but also pivotal in embryonic morphogenesis, regeneration, and cancer. In the context of wound healing, the epithelization…
Collagen forms the structural scaffold of connective tissues in all mammals. Tissues are remarkably resistant against mechanical deformations because collagen molecules hierarchically self-assemble in fibrous networks that stiffen with…
Biological patterns generated during development and regeneration often scale with organism size. Some organisms, e.g., flatworms, can regenerate a rescaled body plan from tissue fragments of varying sizes. Inspired by these examples, we…
Activity can organize matter in unique configurations inaccessible to equilibrium systems, including a sundry of spiraling shapes seen in nature that range from galaxies to living tissues to fossilized stromatolites. How these dynamic yet…