Related papers: Long ligands reinforce biological adhesion under s…

We perform molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the occurrence of inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials. We use rough walls to impose a simple shear flow and study the athermal motion of jammed assemblies of soft…

Bistability is a major mechanism for cellular decision making and usually results from positive feedback in biochemical control systems. Here we show theoretically that bistability between unbound and bound states of adhesion clusters…

In Nature, liquids often circulate in channels textured with leaflets, cilia or porous walls that deform with the flow. These soft structures are optimized to passively control flows and inspire the design of novel microfluidic and soft…

Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical…

Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…

The most important function of proteins may well be to bind to other biomolecules. It has long been felt that kinetic rates of bond formation and dissociation between soluble receptors and ligands might account for most features of the…

We discuss the advantages and results of using a mixing-length, compressible model to account for shear banding behaviour in granular flow. We formulate a general approach based on two function of the solid fraction to be determined.…

In modeling the inflammatory response to a lesion in an artery wall, there are a number of chemotactic mechanisms going on within the wall layer that lead to an arterial plaque. We introduce a rather reduced model of these dynamic…

We present a novel buckling instability relevant to membrane budding in eukaryotic cells. In this mechanism, curved filaments bind to a lipid bilayer without changing its intrinsic curvature. As more and more filaments adsorb, newly added…

Multivalency is a common biological mechanism of formation of strong reversible and selective bonds by grouping weak bonds. Polymers often act as a scaffold to which multiple binding groups are attached. Here I present an analytical theory…

We propose a coarse-grained theoretical model to capture the aging of microfluidic devices under different conditions including constant applied flow rate and constant applied pressure gradient. Microfluidic devices that sort cells by their…

One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…

Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…

A quantitative model of the mobility of functionalized particles at the interface is pivotal to understanding important systems in biology and nanotechnology. In this work, we investigate the emerging dynamics of particles anchored through…

The properties of semiflexible polymers tethered by one end to an impenetrable wall and exposed to oscillatory shear flow are investigated by mesoscale simulations. A polymer, confined in two dimensions, is described by a linear bead-spring…

Chiral polymers are ubiquitous in nature and in the cellular context they are often found in association with membranes. Here we show that surface bound polymers with an intrinsic twist and anisotropic bending stiffness can exhibit a sharp…

Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…

The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…

Tissues are subjected to large external forces and undergo global deformations during morphogenesis. We use synthetic analogues of tissues to study the impact of cell-cell adhesion on the response of cohesive cellular assemblies under such…

The non-linear response of entangled polymers to shear flow is complicated. Its current understanding is framed mainly as a rheological description in terms of the complex viscosity. However, the full picture requires an assessment of the…