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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…
Epithelial tissues act as barriers and, therefore, must repair themselves, respond to environmental changes and grow without compromising their integrity. Consequently, they exhibit complex viscoelastic rheological behavior where…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…
We study particle-scale motion in sheared highly polydisperse amorphous materials, in which the largest particles are as much as ten times the size of the smallest. We find strikingly different behavior from the more commonly studied…
Growth drives cellular dynamics in dense aggregates including bacterial colonies, developing tissues, and tumors. We investigate the underlying physical principles emerging from the interplay of growth, steric repulsion, and motility in a…
We study the interplay of pore-scale mixing and network-scale advection through heterogeneous porous media, and its role for the evolution and asymptotic behavior of hydrodynamic dispersion. In a Lagrangian framework, we identify three…
We investigate theoretically the behavior of proteins as well as other large macromolecules which are incorporated into amphiphilic monolayers at the air-water interface. We assume the monolayer to be in the coexistence region of the…
Depletion-induced interactions between colloids in colloid-polymer mixtures depend in range and strength on size, shape, and concentration of depletants. Crowding by colloids in turn affects shapes of polymer coils, such as biopolymers in…
Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…
We present a deformation-dependent propulsion phenomenon for soft particles such as cells in microchannels. It is based on a broken time reversal symmetry generated by a fast forward and slow backward motion of a fluid which does not…
The formation of microparticles requires the bending of the plasma membrane away from the cytosol. The capcity of the cell membrane to form a microparticle, and the rate of membrane deformation, are controlled by multiple factors, including…
Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…
Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…
A molecular-dynamics type simulation method, which is suitable for investigating the dewetting dynamics of thin and viscous liquid layers, is discussed. The efficiency of the method is exemplified by studying a two-parameter depinning-like…
Complex tissue flows in epithelia are driven by intra- and inter-cellular processes that generate, maintain, and coordinate mechanical forces. There has been growing evidence that cell shape anisotropy, manifested as nematic order, plays an…
Using a popular vertex-based model to describe a spatially disordered planar epithelial monolayer, we examine the relationship between cell shape and mechanical stress at the cell and tissue level. Deriving expressions for stress tensors…
We study the structure and interfacial properties of model athermal mixtures of colloids and excluded volume polymers. The colloid particles are modeled as hard spheres whereas the polymer coils are modeled as chains formed from…
Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…
The macroscopic behaviour of active matter arises from nonequilibrium microscopic processes. In soft materials, active stresses typically drive macroscopic shape changes, which in turn alter the geometry constraining the microscopic…