Related papers: Multicellular rosettes drive fluid-solid transitio…
Many critical biological processes, like wound healing, require confluent cell monolayers/bulk tissues to transition from a jammed solid-like to a fluid-like state. Although numerical studies anticipate changes in the cell shape alone can…
Many forms of cell motility rely on Brownian ratchet mechanisms that involve multiple stochastic processes. We present a computational and theoretical study of the nonequilibrium statistical dynamics of such a many-body ratchet, in the…
Cell neighbor exchanges are integral to tissue rearrangements in biology, including development and repair. Often these processes occur via topological T1 transitions analogous to those observed in foams, grains and colloids. However, in…
The mechanical behaviour and symmetry-breaking shape deformation of red blood cells subjected to shear flows is used to demonstrate that far from being random fluids, both the membrane and cytoplasm of every biological cell undergo…
T1 transitions, which are localised cell rearrangements, play an important role in the fluidization of epithelial monolayers. Using a multi-phase field model and an active elastic solid model, we show that although each cell undergoes T1…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
Tissues are subjected to large external forces and undergo global deformations during morphogenesis. We use synthetic analogues of tissues to study the impact of cell-cell adhesion on the response of cohesive cellular assemblies under such…
The rigidity of elastic networks depends sensitively on their internal connectivity and the nature of the interactions between constituents. Particles interacting via central forces undergo a zero-temperature rigidity-percolation transition…
Fluid stretching in porous media governs the mixing of reactants, contaminants, and nutrients, yet how the solid microstructure controls the stretching statistics remains poorly understood. We investigate how porous-medium heterogeneity…
The displacement of a fluid by another less viscous one in a quasi-two dimensional geometry typically leads to complex fingering patterns. In an isotropic system, dense-branching growth arises, which is characterized by repeated…
A recent study has demonstrated that phase separation in binary liquid mixtures is arrested in the presence of elastic networks and can lead to a nearly uniformly-sized distribution of the dilute-phase droplets. At longer timescales, these…
We analyse a multi-phase field model for an epithelial monolayer with pairwise adhesions between neighbouring cells following an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, representing the stochastic turnover of junctional molecular motors. These…
Substrate-based cell motility is essential for fundamental biological processes, such as tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. Even if a comprehensive understanding of this motility mode remains elusive, progress has been…
Recent experimental and theoretical studies suggest that crystallization and glass-like solidification are useful analogies for understanding cell ordering in confluent biological tissues. It remains unexplored how cellular ordering…
A distinguishing feature of a multicellular living system is that it operates at various scales, from the intracellular to organismal. Very little is known at present on how tissue level properties are related to cell and subcellular…
Functional structures from across the engineered and biological world combine rigid elements such as bones and columns with flexible ones such as cables, fibers and membranes. These structures are known loosely as tensegrities, since these…
Embryonic tissues deform across broad spatial and temporal scales and relax stress through active rearrangements. A quantitative link between cell-scale activity, spatial forcing, and emergent tissue-scale mechanics remains incomplete.…
This work investigates the morphological stability of a soft body composed of two heavy elastic layers, attached to a rigid surface and subjected only to the bulk gravity force. Using theoretical and computational tools, we characterize the…
A wide range of disordered materials, from biological to geological assemblies, feature discrete elements undergoing large shape changes. How significant geometrical variations at the microscopic scale affect the response of the assembly,…