Related papers: Mechanical characterization of disordered and anis…
In vivo and in vitro cells rely on the support of an underlying biocompatible substrate, such as the extracellular matrix or a culture substrate, to spread and proliferate. The mechanical and chemical properties of such structures play a…
We study interactions between biological cells that apply anisotropic active mechanical forces on an elastic substrate. We model the cells as thin discs that along their perimeters apply radial, but angle-dependent forces on the substrate.…
An adequate control of cell response in tissue engineering applications is of utmost importance to obtain products suitable to clinical practice. This paper is the first part of a series of two connected publications in which we study via…
Surface tension governed by differential adhesion can drive fluid particle mixtures to sort into separate regions, i.e., demix. Does the same phenomenon occur in confluent biological tissues? We begin to answer this question for epithelial…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier that they…
Open cellular solids usually possess random microstructures that may contain a characteristic length scale, such as the cell size. This gives rise to size dependent mechanical properties where large systems behave differently from small…
We develop a model of amoeboid cell motility based on active gel theory. Modeling the motile apparatus of a eukaryotic cell as a confined layer of finite length of poroelastic active gel permeated by a solvent, we first show that, due to…
In tissue development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, coordinated cell motion arises from active forces produced by the cells. The relationship between force and motion remains unclear, however, because the forces result from a sum of…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
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…
The mechanics of biological tissues mainly proceeds from the cell cortex rheology. A direct, explicit link between cortex rheology and tissue rheology remains lacking, yet would be instrumental in understanding how modulations of cortical…
Cell growth, division and death are defining features of biological tissues that contribute to morphogenesis. In hydrodynamic descriptions of cohesive tissues, their occurrence implies a non-zero rate of variation of cell density. We show…
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…
Collective cell migration is a highly regulated process involved in wound healing, cancer metastasis and morphogenesis. Mechanical interactions among cells provide an important regulatory mechanism to coordinate such collective motion.…
In processes such as embryo shaping, wound healing, and malignant cell invasion, epithelial cells transition between dispersed phases, where the cells move independently, and condensed phases, where they aggregate and deform to close gaps,…
We study a shape evolution framework in which the deformation of shapes from time t to t + dt is governed by a regularized anisotropic elasticity model. More precisely, we assume that at each time shapes are infinitesimally deformed from a…
Network equilibrium models represent a versatile tool for the analysis of interconnected objects and their relationships. They have been widely employed in both science and engineering to study the behavior of complex systems under various…
The cytoskeleton (CSK) plays an important role in many cell functions. Given the similarities between the mechanical behavior of tensegrity structures and the CSK, many studies have proposed different tensegrity-based models for simulating…
The mechanical behaviour of solid biological tissues has long been described using models based on classical continuum mechanics. However, the classical continuum theories of elasticity and viscoelasticity cannot easily capture the…