Related papers: Control of cell colony growth by contact inhibitio…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
Cells coexist together in colonies or as tissues. Their behaviour is controlled by an interplay between intercellular forces and biochemical regulation. We develop a simple model of the cell cycle, the fundamental regulatory network…
Contact inhibition limits migration and proliferation of cells in cell colonies. We consider a multiphase field model to investigate the growth dynamics of a cell colony, composed of proliferating cells. The model takes into account the…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
Control of cell proliferation is a fundamental aspect of tissue physiology central to morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer. Although many of the molecular genetic factors are now known, the system level regulation of growth is still…
The dispersal of cells from an initially constrained location is a crucial aspect of many physiological phenomena ranging from morphogenesis to tumour spreading. In such processes, the way cell-cell interactions impact the motion of single…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
We study colonies of non-motile, rod-shaped bacteria growing on solid substrates. In our model, bacteria interact purely mechanically, by pushing each other away as they grow, and consume a diffusing nutrient. We show that mechanical…
Regulation of cell proliferation is a crucial aspect of tissue development and homeostasis and plays a major role in morphogenesis, wound healing, and tumor invasion. A phenomenon of such regulation is contact inhibition, which describes…
Ever since the ground breaking work of Trepat et al. in 2009, we know that cell colonies growing on a substrate can be under tensile mechanical stress. The origin of tension has so far been attributed to cellular motility forces being…
The spatiotemporal coordination and regulation of cell proliferation is fundamental in many aspects of development and tissue maintenance. Cells have the ability to adapt their division rates in response to mechanical constraints, yet we do…
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
Controlling growth via cell division is crucial in the development of higher organisms, and yet the mechanisms through which this is achieved, e.g., in epithelial tissue, is not yet fully understood. We show that by coupling the cell cycle…
Mechanical interactions among cells in a growing microbial colony can significantly influence the colony's spatial genetic structure and, thus, evolutionary outcomes such as the fates of rare mutations. Here, we computationally investigate…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
Contact inhibition refers to a reduction in the rate of cell migration and/or cell proliferation in regions of high cell density. Under normal conditions contact inhibition is associated with the proper functioning tissues, whereas abnormal…
In the growth of bacterial colonies, a great variety of complex patterns are observed in experiments, depending on external conditions and the bacterial species. Typically, existing models employ systems of reaction-diffusion equations or…
Colonies of rod-shaped bacteria constitute a system of colloidal active matter with nematic properties. As a single initial bacterium multiplies through repeated divisions, the resulting colony quickly loses long-range orientational order,…
The mechanics of crawling cells on a substrate is investigated by using a minimal model that satisfies the force-free condition. A cell is described by two subcellular elements connected by a linear actuator that changes the length of the…