Related papers: Small-scale demixing in confluent biological tissu…
The interplay of membrane proteins is vital for many biological processes, such as cellular transport, cell division, and signal transduction between nerve cells. Theoretical considerations have led to the idea that the membrane itself…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
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…
During development and under normal physiological conditions, biological tissues are continuously subjected to substantial mechanical stresses. In response to large deformations cells in a tissue must undergo multicellular rearrangements in…
The self-organization of proteins into enriched compartments and the formation of complex patterns are crucial processes for life on the cellular level. Liquid-liquid phase separation is one mechanism for forming such enriched compartments.…
We consider mixtures of two species of spherical colloidal particles that differ in their hydrodynamic radii, but are otherwise identical, in the presence of an external field. Since the particle-particle and particle-field interactions are…
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…
Biological processes, from morphogenesis to tumor invasion, spontaneously generate shear stresses inside living tissue. The mechanisms that govern the transmission of mechanical forces in epithelia and the collective response of the tissue…
The shapes of epithelial tissues result from a complex interplay of contractile forces in the cytoskeleta of the cells in the tissue, and adhesion forces between them. A host of discrete, cell-based models describe these forces by assigning…
We formulate a hydrodynamic theory of confluent epithelia: i.e. monolayers of epithelial cells adhering to each other without gaps. Taking advantage of recent progresses toward establishing a general hydrodynamic theory of p-atic liquid…
In dense flowing bidisperse particle mixtures varying in size or density alone, smaller particles sink (driven by percolation) and lighter particles rise (driven by buoyancy). But when the particle species differ from each other in both…
The relationship between cell density and velocity is often assumed to be negative, reflecting crowding-induced suppression of movement. However, observations across systems reveal a more nuanced picture: while some emphasize contact…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
Morphogenesis, tissue regeneration and cancer invasion involve transitions in tissue morphology. These transitions, caused by collective cell migration (CCM), have been interpreted as active wetting/de-wetting transitions. This phenomenon…
It is well known that the increase of the spatial dimensionality enhances the fluid-fluid demixing of a binary mixture of hard hyperspheres, i.e. the demixing occurs for lower mixture size asymmetry as compared to the three-dimensional…
Epithelial tissues play a fundamental role in various morphogenetic events during development and early embryogenesis. Although epithelial monolayers are often modeled as two-dimensional (2D) elastic surfaces, they distinguish themselves…