Related papers: Tissue flow induces cell shape changes during orga…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…
Cell shape is determined by a balance of intrinsic properties of the cell as well as its mechanochemical environment. Inhomogeneous shape changes underly many morphogenetic events and involve spatial gradients in active cellular forces…
The dynamics of cellular pattern formation is crucial for understanding embryonic development and tissue morphogenesis. Recent studies have shown that human dermal fibroblasts cultured on liquid crystal elastomers can exhibit an increase in…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Eukaryotic cells intrinsically change their shape, by changing the composition of their membrane and by restructuring their underlying cytoskeleton. We present here further studies and extensions of a minimal physical model, describing a…
In undulatory swimming of fish, muscles contract sequentially along the body to generate a bending wave that pushes against the water and produces thrust. Here, we use a 3D computational fluid dynamics model coupled to the motion of the…
A constitutive relation between stress and strain relative to a reference state is the basic assumption of elasticity theory. However, in living matter, force generation is governed by motor molecule activity, which does not depend on…
We show that the formation of membrane tubes (or membrane tethers), which is a crucial step in many biological processes, is highly non-trivial and involves first order shape transitions. The force exerted by an emerging tube is a…
Despite the wide existence of vesicles in living cells as well as their important applications like drug-delivery, the underlying mechanism of vesicle fusion/fission remains under debate. Here, we develop a constrained self-consistent field…
We use numerical simulations to systematically investigate the vesicle dynamics in two-dimensional (2D) Taylor-Green vortex flow in the absence of inertial forces. Vesicles are highly deformable membranes encapsulating an incompressible…
While the behavior of vesicles in thermodynamic equilibrium has been studied extensively, how active forces control vesicle shape transformations is not understood. Here, we combine theory and simulations to study the shape behavior of…
In this paper we study the locomotion of a shape-changing body swimming in a two-dimensional perfect fluid of infinite extent. The shape-changes are prescribed as functions of time satisfying constraints ensuring that they result from the…
A mathematical model is proposed for shape evolution and locomotion of fish epidermal keratocytes on elastic substrates. The model is based on mechanosensing concepts: cells apply contractile forces onto the elastic substrate, while cell…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Mathematical models come in many forms across biological applications. In the case of complex, spatial dynamics and pattern formation, stochastic models also face two main challenges: pattern data is largely qualitative, and model…
Collective cell migration plays a central role in tissue development, morphogenesis, wound repair and cancer progression. With the growing realization that physical forces mediate cell motility in development and physiology, a key…
Motivated by the reported peculiar dynamics of a red blood cell in shear flow, we develop an analytical theory for the motion of a nearly--spherical fluid particle enclosed by a visco--elastic incompressible interface in linear flows. The…
A continuum model of epithelial tissue mechanics was formulated using cellular-level mechanical ingredients and cell morphogenetic processes, including cellular shape changes and cellular rearrangements. This model can include finite…
Vesicles are becoming a quite popular model for the study of red blood cells (RBCs). This is a free boundary problem which is rather difficult to handle theoretically. Quantitative computational approaches constitute also a challenge. In…