Related papers: Random Walker Models for Durotaxis

The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…

Cell-to-cell variability is inherent to numerous biological processes, including cell migration. Quantifying and characterizing the variability of migrating cells is challenging, as it requires monitoring many cells for long time windows…

Intracellular dynamics in living tissue are dominated by active transport driven by bioenergetic processes far from thermal equilibrium. Intracellular constituents typically execute persistent walks. In the limit of long mean-free paths,…

Locally activated random walks are defined as random processes, whose dynamical parameters are modified upon visits to given activation sites. Such dynamics naturally emerge in living systems as varied as immune and cancer cells interacting…

In this work we approach cell migration under a large-scale assumption, so that the system reduces to a particle in motion. Unlike classical particle models, the cell displacement results from its internal activity: the cell velocity is a…

Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…

The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…

The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…

Crawling cell motility is vital to many biological processes such as wound healing and the immune response. Using a minimal model we investigate the effects of patterned substrate adhesiveness and biophysical cell parameters on the…

Active walker models have proved to be extremely effective in understanding the evolution of a large class of systems in biology like ant trail formation and pedestrian trails. We propose a simple model of a random walker which modifies its…

How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solid-like to a fluid-like state or vice versa. Here, we introduce a new way for…

Cells often migrate on curved surfaces inside the body, such as curved tissues, blood vessels or highly curved protrusions of other cells. Recent \textit{in-vitro} experiments provide clear evidence that motile cells are affected by the…

Self-generated gradients have atttracted a lot of attention in the recent biological literature. It is considered as a robust strategy for a group of cells to find its way during a long journey. This note is intended to discuss various…

Multicellular tissues are the building blocks of many biological systems and organs. These tissues are not static, but dynamically change over time. Even if the overall structure remains the same there is a turnover of cells within the…

The scaling properties of a random walker subject to the global constraint that it needs to visit each site an even number of times are determined. Such walks are realized in the equilibrium state of one dimensional surfaces that are…

First principle gyrokinetic simulation of the edge turbulent transport in toroidal plasmas finds a reverse trend in the turbulent transport coefficients under strong gradients. It is found that there exist both linear and nonlinear critical…

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…

In contexts ranging from embryonic development to bacterial ecology, cell populations migrate chemotactically along self-generated chemical gradients, often forming a propagating front. Here, we theoretically show that the stability of such…

Motile cells often explore natural environments characterized by a high degree of structural complexity. Moreover cell motility is also intrinsically noisy due to spontaneous random reorientation and speed fluctuations. This interplay of…

Many physiological phenomena involve directional cell migration. It is usually attributed to chemical gradients in vivo. Recently, other cues have been shown to guide cells in vitro, including stiffness/adhesion gradients or micro-patterned…