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Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
Mollusk shells are an ideal model system for understanding the morpho-elastic basis of morphological evolution of invertebrates' exoskeletons. During the formation of the shell, the mantle tissue secretes proteins and minerals that calcify…
Many types of motile cells perform durotaxis, namely, directed migration following gradients of substrate stiffness. Recent experiments have revealed that cell monolayers can migrate toward stiffer regions even when individual cells do not…
Exploring and modeling heterogeneous elastic surfaces requires multiple interactions with the environment and a complex selection of physical material parameters. The most common approaches model deformable properties from sets of offline…
Cells move differently on substrates with different elasticities. In particular, the persistence time of their motion is higher on stiffer substrates. We show that this behavior will result in a net transport of cells directed up a…
The mechanism by which cells measure the dimension of the organ in which they are embedded, and slow down their growth when the final size is reached, is a long-standing problem of developmental biology. The role of mechanics in this…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
Cells within living soft biological tissues seem to promote the maintenance of a mechanical state within a defined range near a so-called set-point. This mechanobiological process is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. During this…
We consider a continuum mathematical model of biological tissue formation inspired by recent experiments describing thin tissue growth in 3D-printed bioscaffolds. The continuum model involves a partial differential equation describing the…
The theories of aero- and hydrodynamics predict animal movement and device design in air and water through the computation of lift, drag, and thrust forces. Although models of terrestrial legged locomotion have focused on interactions with…
Animal morphogenesis involves complex tissue deformation processes, which require tight control over tissue rheology. Yet, it remains insufficiently understood how tissue rheology results from the interplay between cellular packing and…
We develop an analytical theory to explain the experimentally-observed morphological transitions of giant vesicles induced by AC electric fields (1). The model treats the inner and suspending media as lossy dielectrics, while the membrane…
To survive in ever-changing environments, living organisms need to continuously combine the ongoing external inputs they receive, representing present conditions, with their dynamical internal state, which includes influences of past…
We consider a cellular monolayer, described using a vertex-based model, for which cells form a spatially disordered array of convex polygons that tile the plane. Equilibrium cell configurations are assumed to minimize a global energy…
To understand the non-equilibrium relaxation dynamics of a liquid droplet on a switchable substrate the interplay of different length- and time-scales needs to be understood. We present a method to map the microscopic information, resulting…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…
A two-dimensional mathematical model for cells migrating without adhesion capabilities is presented and analyzed. Cells are represented by their cortex, which is modelled as an elastic curve, subject to an internal pressure force. Net…
We develop an unstructured mathematical model describing the growth kinetics of the Trichoderma fungus and the production of enzymes (cellulase) by degradation of a substrate (cellulose) in the rhizosphere. We integrate into this model the…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…