Related papers: Cell motility, synchronization, and cell traction …
Cells and tissues exert forces and can actively change shape. This strikingly autonomous behavior is powered by the cytoskeleton, which includes an active gel of actin filaments, crosslinks, and myosin molecular motors. Although individual…
Cell motility is connected to the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a circular shape. In https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.078102, Blanch-Mercader and Casademunt perfomed a nonlinear analysis of the minimal model proposed by Callan and…
Correlated velocity patterns and associated large length-scale transmission of traction forces have been observed in collective live cell migration as a response to a "wound". We argue that a simple physical model of a force-driven…
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…
Synchronization of activity among myocytes constituting vital organs, e.g., the heart, is crucial for physiological functions. Self-organized coordination in such heterogeneous ensemble of excitable and oscillatory cells is therefore of…
The present habilitation thesis in theoretical biological physics addresses two central dynamical processes in cells and organisms: (i) active motility and motility control and (ii) self-organized pattern formation. The unifying theme is…
Actin filaments, crosslinkers and myosin molecular motors form contractile networks. For instance, the cell cortex is a thin network below the cell membrane ; contraction of the cell cortex allows cells to round up during cell division.…
From biofilm and colony formation in bacteria to wound healing and embryonic development in multicellular organisms, groups of living cells must often move collectively. While considerable study has probed the biophysical mechanisms of how…
Ordered, collective motions commonly arise spontaneously in systems of many interacting, active units, ranging from cellular tissues and bacterial colonies to self-propelled colloids and animal flocks. Active phases are especially rich when…
Many active fluid systems encountered in biology are set in total geometric confinement. Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells is a prominent and ubiquitous example, in which cargo-carrying molecular motors move along polymer filaments and…
Biological tissues transform between solid-like and liquid-like states in many fundamental physiological events. Recent experimental observations further suggest that in two-dimensional epithelial tissues these solid-liquid transformations…
Amoeboid cell migration is characterized by frequent changes of the direction of motion and resembles a persistent random walk on long time scales. Although it is well known that cell migration is typically driven by the actin cytoskeleton,…
Cell polarization relies on long-range cortical flows, which are driven by active stresses and resisted by the cytoskeletal network. While the general mechanisms that contribute to cortical flows are known, a quantitative understanding of…
Motility is an essential factor for an organism's survival and diversification. With the advent of novel single-cell technologies, analytical frameworks and theoretical methods, we can begin to probe the complex lives of microscopic motile…
In this work, a mathematical model of self-oscillatory dynamics of the metabolism in a cell is studied. The full phase-parametric characteristics of variations of the form of attractors depending on the dissipation of a kinetic membrane…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
In this fluid dynamics video, we present the first time-resolved measurements of the oscillatory velocity field induced by swimming unicellular microorganisms. Confinement of the green alga C. reinhardtii in stabilized thin liquid films…
We characterize cell motion in experiments and show that the transition to collective motion in colonies of gliding bacterial cells confined to a monolayer appears through the organization of cells into larger moving clusters. Collective…
Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…
Swimming micro-organisms such as bacteria or spermatozoa are typically found in dense suspensions, and exhibit collective modes of locomotion qualitatively different from that displayed by isolated cells. In the dilute limit where…