Related papers: Membrane morphologies induced by arc-shaped scaffo…
An integrated mechanical model for fiber-laden membranes is presented and representative predictions of relevance to cellulose ordering and orientation in the plant cell wall are presented. The model describes nematic liquid crystalline…
We show that inversion-asymmetric tethered membranes exhibit a new double-spiral phase with long range orientational order not present in symmetric membranes. We calculate the universal algebraic spiral shapes of these membranes in this…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
While modern structural biology has provided us with a rich and diverse picture of membrane proteins, the biological function of membrane proteins is often influenced by the mechanical properties of the surrounding lipid bilayer. Here we…
Cellular uptake of nanoplastics is instrumental in their environmental accumulation and transfer to humans through the food chain. Despite extensive studies using spherical plastic nanoparticles, the influence of the morphological…
Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
We introduce a novel model, comprising self-avoiding surfaces and incorporating edges and tubules, that is designed to characterize the structural morphologies and transitions observed within the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). By employing…
A contemporary procedure to grow artificial tissue is to seed cells onto a porous biomaterial scaffold and culture it within a perfusion bioreactor to facilitate the transport of nutrients to growing cells. Typical models of cell growth for…
In growing plant cells, parallel ordering of microtubules (MTs) along the inner surface of the cell membrane influences the direction of cell expansion and thereby plant morphology. For correct expansion of organs that primarily grow by…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
The technique presented here identifies tethered mould designs, optimised for growing cultured tissue with very highly-aligned cells. It is based on a microscopic biophysical model for polarised cellular hydrogels. There is an unmet need…
In clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), clathrin and various adaptor proteins coat a patch of the plasma membrane, which is reshaped to form a budded vesicle. Experimental studies have demonstrated that elevated membrane tension can inhibit…
Branching architecture characterizes numerous systems, ranging from synthetic (hyper)branched polymers and biomolecules such as lignin, amylopectin, and nucleic acids to tracheal and neuronal networks. Its ubiquity reflects the many…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…
A remarkable property of flexible self-avoiding elastic surfaces (membranes) is that they remain flat at all temperatures, even in the absence of a bending rigidity or in the presence of active fluctuations. Here, we report numerical…
The recent discovery of a lateral organization in cell membranes due to small structures called 'rafts' has motivated a lot of biological and physico-chemical studies. A new experiment on a model system has shown a spectacular budding…
Living cells employ excitable reaction-diffusion waves for internal cellular functions, in which curvature-inducing proteins are often involved. However, the role of their mechanochemical coupling is not well understood. Here, we report the…
Interfaces between stratified epithelia and their supporting stromas commonly exhibit irregular shapes. Undulations are particularly pronounced in dysplastic tissues and typically evolve into long, finger-like protrusions in carcinomas. In…
Cell membranes are studded with protrusions that were thoroughly analyzed with electron microscopy. However, the nanometer-scale three-dimensional motions generated by cell membranes to fit the topography of foreign surfaces and initiate…