Related papers: Elongation and shape changes in organisms with cel…
Morphogenesis involves complex shape changes of biological tissues. Yet, tissue shape changes depend on tissue rheology, which in turn arises from the interplay of large numbers of cells. Here, we link cell- and tissue-scale mechanics by…
Bacterial cells exhibit a diverse array of shapes and sizes, largely governed by their cell walls in conjunction with cytoskeletal proteins and internal turgor pressure. The present study develops a theoretical framework for modeling the…
A common developmental process, called branching morphogenesis, generates the epithelial trees in a variety of organs, including the lungs, kidneys, and glands. How branching morphogenesis can create epithelial architectures of very…
This work probes the role of cell geometry in orienting self-organized fluid flows in the late stage Drosophila oocyte. Recent theoretical work has shown that a model, which relies only on hydrodynamic interactions of flexible, cortically…
Eukaryote cells have a flexible shape, which dynamically changes according to the function performed by the cell. One mechanism for deforming the cell membrane into the desired shape is through the expression of curved membrane proteins.…
There are a great many proteins that localize to and collectively generate curvature in biological fluid membranes. We study changes in the topology of fluid membranes due to the presence of highly anisotropic, curvature-inducing proteins.…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Plants are a paradigm for active shape control in response to stimuli. For instance, it is well-known that a tilted plant will eventually straighten vertically, demonstrating the influence of both an external stimulus, gravity, and an…
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…
Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…
The growth, form, and division of prebiotic vesicles, membraneous bags of fluid of varying components and shapes is hypothesized to have served as the substrate for the origin of life. The dynamics of these out-of-equilibrium structures is…
In multicellular organisms, relations among parts and between parts and the whole are contextual and interdependent. These organisms and their cells are ontogenetically linked: an organism starts as a cell that divides producing…
Many closed-cell foams exhibit an elongated cell shape in the foam rise direction, resulting in anisotropic compressive properties. Nevertheless, the underlying deformation mechanisms and how cell shape anisotropy induces this mechanical…
Convergence extension, the simultaneous elongation of tissue along one axis while narrowing along a perpendicular axis, occurs during embryonic development. A fundamental process that contributes to shaping the organism, it happens in many…
The phenomenological model for cell shape deformation and cell migration (Chen et.al. 2018; Vermolen and Gefen 2012) is extended with the incorporation of cell traction forces and the evolution of cell equilibrium shapes as a result of cell…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Mathematical models have recently been used to cast doubt on the biotic origin of stromatolites. Here by contrast we propose a biotic model for stromatolite morphogenesis which considers the relationship between upward growth of a…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
We experimentally explore the morphological evolution of cages in quasi-two-dimensional suspensions of colloidal fluids, uncovering a complex dynamic restructuring in the fluid. Although cages display isotropic evolution in the laboratory…
In this article, we propose a general framework to study the dynamics and topology of cellular networks that capture the geometry of cell packings in two-dimensional tissues. Such epithelia undergo large-scale deformation during…