Related papers: Active wetting of epithelial tissues
Animal morphogenesis involves complex tissue deformation processes, which require tight control over tissue rheology. Yet, it remains insufficiently understood how tissue rheology results from the interplay between cellular packing and…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
Biological tissues exhibit complex behaviors with their dynamics often resembling inert soft matter such as liquids, polymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. These analogies enable physics-based approaches for investigations of emergent…
Foam is a canonical example of disordered soft matter where local force balance leads to the competition of many metastable configurations. Here we present an experimental and theoretical framework for "active foam" where an individual…
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of two-dimensional (2D) materials been widely studied for emerging electronic properties. In this work, we use computational simulations to examine the water adsorption on TMDs…
Two-dimensional (2D) mechanical models of confluent tissues have related the mechanical state of a monolayer of cells to the average perimeter length of the cell cross sections, predicting floppiness or rigidity of the material. For the…
In living cells, protein-rich condensates can wet the cell membrane and surfaces of membrane-bound organelles. Interestingly, many phase-separating proteins also bind to membranes leading to a molecular layer of bound molecules. Here we…
We present a hydrodynamic model of spreading epithelial monolayers as polar viscous fluids, with active contractility and traction on the substrate. The combination of both active forces generate an instability that leads to nonlinear…
Swelling is a volumetric-growth process in which a porous material expands by spontaneous imbibition of additional pore fluid. Swelling is distinct from other growth processes in that it is inherently poromechanical: Local expansion of the…
We propose a two-scale model to resolve essential features of developmental tissue deformations. The model couples individual cellular behavior to the mechanics at tissue scale. This is realized by a multiphase-field model addressing the…
Epithelial cell monolayers exhibit traveling mechanical waves. We rationalize this observation thanks to a hydrodynamic description of the monolayer as a compressible, active and polar material. We show that propagating waves of the cell…
Wetting of liquid droplets on passive surfaces is ubiquitous in our daily lives, and the governing physical laws are well-understood. When surfaces become active, however, the governing laws of wetting remain elusive. Here we propose…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
The Vertex Model for epithelia models the apical surface of the tissue by a tiling, with polygons representing cells and edges representing cell-cell junctions. The mechanics are described by an energy governed by deviations from a target…
Surface tension governed by differential adhesion can drive fluid particle mixtures to sort into separate regions, i.e., demix. Does the same phenomenon occur in confluent biological tissues? We begin to answer this question for epithelial…
The coordinated behaviors of epithelial cells are widely observed in tissue development, such as re-epithelialization, tumor growth, and morphogenesis. In these processes, cells either migrate collectively or organize themselves into…
Confluent cell monolayers and epithelia tissues show remarkable patterns and correlations in structural arrangements and actively-driven collective flows. We simulate these properties using multiphase field models. The models are based on…
Controlling interfaces of phase separating fluid mixtures is key to creating diverse functional soft materials. Traditionally, this is accomplished with surface-modifying chemical agents. Using experiment and theory, we study how mechanical…