Related papers: Random Walker Models for Durotaxis
Experimental studies of the diffusion of biomolecules in the environment of biological cells are routinely confronted with multiple sources of stochasticity, whose identification renders the detailed data analysis of single molecule…
Durotaxis motion is a spectacular phenomenon manifesting itself by the autonomous motion of a nano-object between parts of a substrate with different stiffness. This motion usually takes place along a stiffness gradient from softer to…
Background: This study is mainly motivated by the need of understanding how the diffusion behaviour of a biomolecule (or even of a larger object) is affected by other moving macromolecules, organelles, and so on, inside a living cell,…
The conditions under which biological cells switch from a static to a motile state are fundamental to the understanding of many healthy and pathological processes. In this paper, we show that even in the presence of a fully symmetric…
Coordinated and cooperative motion of cells is essential for embryonic development, tissue morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer invasion. A predictive understanding of the emergent mechanical behaviors in collective cell motion is…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
Random walks are studied on disordered cellular networks in 2-and 3-dimensional spaces with arbitrary curvature. The coefficients of the evolution equation are calculated in term of the structural properties of the cellular system. The…
Applications such as digital microfluidics and bio-diagnostics rely on droplet locomotion. A prominent example of such motion is durotaxis, a phenomenon that requires a stiffness gradient along a surface for the transport of liquids, cells,…
Cells are constantly exposed to diverse stimuli-chemical, mechanical, or electrical-that guide their movement. In physiological conditions, these signals often overlap, as seen during infections, where neutrophils and dendritic cells…
The magnitude of traction forces exerted by living animal cells on their environment is a monotonically increasing and approximately sigmoidal function of the stiffness of the external medium. This observation is rationalized using active…
Cells can show not only spontaneous movement but also tactic responses to environmental signals. Since the former can be regarded as the basis to realize the latter, playing essential roles in various cellular functions, it is important to…
Experiments on particles' motion in living cells show that it is often subdiffusive. This subdiffusion may be due to trapping, percolation-like structures, or viscoelatic behavior of the medium. While the models based on trapping (leading…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
During the past century, biologists and mathematicians investigated two mechanisms underlying bacteria motion: the run phase during which bacteria move in straight lines and the tumble phase in which they change their orientation. When…
Many transport processes in nature take place on substrates, often considered as unidimensional lanes. These unidimensional substrates are typically non-static: affected by a fluctuating environment, they can undergo conformational changes.…
Collective cell migration is a multicellular phenomenon that arises in various biological contexts, including cancer and embryo development. "Collectiveness" can be promoted by cell-cell interactions such as co-attraction and contact…
In a cellular medium, the plasmic membrane is a place of interactions between the cell and its direct external environment. A classic model describes it as a fluid mosaic. The fluid phase of the membrane allows a lateral degree of freedom…
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
Many biological active agents respond to gradients of environmental cues by redirecting their motion. Besides the well-studied prominent examples such as photo- and chemotaxis, there has been considerable recent interest in topotaxis, i.e.\…
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…