Related papers: A Mechanical Instability in Planar Epithelial Mono…

Epithelial cell clusters often move collectively on a substrate. Mechanical signals play a major role in organizing this behavior. There are a number of experimental observations in these systems which await a comprehensive explanation.…

Cells crawling through tissues migrate inside a complex fibrous environment called the extracellular matrix (ECM), which provides signals regulating motility. Here we investigate one such well-known pathway, involving mutually antagonistic…

We study the conformation of a heterogeneous surfactant monolayer at a fluid-fluid interface, near a boundary between two lateral regions of differing elastic properties. The monolayer attains a conformation of shallow, steep `mesas' with a…

Tissue fusion eliminates physical voids in a tissue to form a continuous structure and is central to many processes in development and repair. Fusion events in vivo, particularly in embryonic development, often involve the purse-string…

Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…

We study theoretically the shapes of a dividing epithelial monolayer of cells lying on top of an elastic stroma. The negative tension created by cell division provokes a buckling instability at a finite wave vector leading to the formation…

Cells are dynamic systems characterized by temporal variations in biophysical properties such as stiffness and contractility. Recent studies show that the recruitment and release of actin filaments into and out of the cell cortex - a…

Gaining access to the cell interior is fundamental for many applications, such as electrical recording, drug and biomolecular delivery. A very promising technique consists of culturing cells on nano/micro pillars. The tight adhesion and…

We derive a continuum mechanical model to capture the morphological changes occurring at the pretumoral stage of epithelial tissues. The proposed model aims to investigate the competition between the bulk elasticity of the epithelium and…

The flows of tissues of epithelial cells often involve T1 transitions. These neighbour exchanges are irreversible rearrangements crossing an energy barrier. Here, by an exact geometric construction, I determine this energy barrier for…

Epithelia form protective barriers in multicellular organisms. To maintain homeostasis, they must be able to regenerate and heal damaged areas. This occurs through collective cell migration, during which finger-like protrusions commonly…

Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…

We investigate the viscoelastic relaxation to equilibrium of a disordered planar epithelium described using the cell vertex model. In its standard form, the model is formulated as coupled evolution equations for the locations of vertices of…

The vertex model is a popular framework for modelling tightly packed biological cells, such as confluent epithelia. Cells are described by convex polygons tiling the plane and their equilibrium is found by minimizing a global mechanical…

We perform cell segmentation on images from experimental studies of confluent, mobile cells in epithelial monolayers and show that these systems possess a broad, positively-skewed shape parameter distribution $P(\mathcal{A})$, where…

During embryonic development, structures with complex geometry can emerge from planar epithelial monolayers and to study these shape transitions is of key importance for revealing the biophysical laws involved in the morphogenesis of…

In multicellular organisms, epithelial cells form layers separating compartments responsible for different physiological functions. At the early stage of epithelial layer formation, each cell of an aggregate defines an inner and an outer…

In tissue development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, coordinated cell motion arises from active forces produced by the cells. The relationship between force and motion remains unclear, however, because the forces result from a sum of…

We study the indentation of a free-standing lipid membrane suspended over a nanopore on a hydrophobic substrate by means of molecular dynamics simulations. We find that in the course of indentation, the membrane bends at the point of…

Cell migration is important in many biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly constrained by its neighbors, leading to glassy dynamics.…