Related papers: Small-scale demixing in confluent biological tissu…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
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…
During embryonic morphogenesis, tissues undergo dramatic deformations in order to form functional organs. Similarly, in adult animals, living cells and tissues are continually subjected to forces and deformations. Therefore, the success of…
As small particles skim our airways during breathing, or our intestines during digestion, the surface epithelium is subjected to local exogenous shear that deforms hundreds to thousands of tightly interacting cells. Unlike shear…
Active systems are inherently out of equilibrium, as they collect energy from their surroundings and transform it into directed motion. A recent theoretical study suggests that binary mixtures of active particles with distinct effective…
The influence of poor solvent quality on fluid demixing of a model mixture of colloids and nonadsorbing polymers is investigated using density functional theory. The colloidal particles are modelled as hard spheres and the polymer coils as…
Liquid-liquid phase separation, whereby two liquids spontaneously demix, is ubiquitous in industrial, environmental, and biological processes. While isotropic fluids are known to condense into spherical droplets in the binodal region, these…
Soft elastic composite materials can serve as actuators when they transform changes in external fields into mechanical deformation. Here, we address the corresponding deformational behavior of magnetic gels and elastomers, consisting of…
T1 transitions, which are localised cell rearrangements, play an important role in the fluidization of epithelial monolayers. Using a multi-phase field model and an active elastic solid model, we show that although each cell undergoes T1…
Fluid stretching in porous media governs the mixing of reactants, contaminants, and nutrients, yet how the solid microstructure controls the stretching statistics remains poorly understood. We investigate how porous-medium heterogeneity…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
We present a single, unified, multi-scale model to study the attachment\detachment dynamics of two deforming, near spherical cells, coated with binding ligands and subject to a slow, homogeneous shear flow in a viscous fluid medium. The…
The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity transition controlled by a mechanical parameter that…
An important open question in the modeling of biological tissues is how to identify the right scale for coarse-graining, or equivalently, the right number of degrees of freedom. For confluent biological tissues, both vertex and Voronoi…
Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…
Predicting segregation of granular materials composed of different-sized particles is a challenging problem. In this paper, we develop and implement a theoretical model that captures the interplay between advection, segregation, and…
The effective mixing behavior of solutes in porous media is fundamentally connected to the development of a local mixing interface between the two initial solutions, which is characterized by a complex lamellar structure. The deformation of…
We introduce a particle-based model of self-replicating cells on a deformable substrate composed of the dermis and the basement membrane and investigate the relationship between dermal deformations and stem cell pattering on it. We show…
Ethanol injection and variations of it are a class of methods where two miscible phases---one of which contains dissolved lipids---are mixed together leading to the self-assembly of lipid molecules to form liposomes. This method has been…
We investigate the growth of a film of some element B on a substrate made of another substrance A in a model of molecular beam epitaxy. A vertical exchange mechanism allows the A-atoms to stay on the growing surface with a certain…