Related papers: Mechanical interplay between cell shape and actin …
Order and alignment are ubiquitous in growing colonies of rod-shaped bacteria due to the nematic properties of the constituent particles. These effects are the result of the active stresses generated by growth, passive mechanical…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension…
Cell migration is closely linked to cell shape, yet cell size is often assumed to remain constant. This assumption is challenged by recent experiments showing that cells undergo volume loss during spreading and swelling upon activation,…
Stress generation by the actin cytoskeleton shapes cells and tissues. Despite impressive progress in live imaging and quantitative physical descriptions of cytoskeletal network dynamics, the connection between processes at molecular scales…
Cell shape changes are vital for many physiological processes such as cell proliferation, cell migration and morphogenesis. They emerge from an orchestrated interplay of active cellular force generation and passive cellular force response -…
This study theoretically investigates how anisotropic curved membrane components (CMCs) control vesicle morphology through curvature sensing, nematic alignment, topological defects, and volume constraints. By comparing arc-shaped and…
Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing fraction is effectively fixed, the prevailing paradigm…
We generated a computational approach to analyze the biomechanics of epithelial cell aggregates, either island or stripes or entire monolayers, that combines both vertex and contact-inhibition-of-locomotion models to include both cell-cell…
Mechanical coupling between a cell and substrate relies on focal adhesions, clusters of adhesion proteins linking stress fibers (bundles of actin proteins) inside the cell with surrounding tissue. Focal adhesions have been demonstrated to…
The study of spindle-like cells as nematic liquid crystals has led to remarkable insights in the understanding of tissue organization and morphogenesis. In the characterization of this anomalous liquid crystal material, we focus on the…
Cadherin adhesion receptors are fundamental determinants of tissue organization in health and disease. Increasingly, we have come to appreciate that classical cadherins exert their biological actions through active cooperation with the…
Self organization mechanisms are essential for the cytoskeleton to adapt to the requirements of living cells. They rely on the intricate interplay of cytoskeletal filaments, crosslinking proteins and molecular motors. Here we present an in…
Computer simulations can aid in understanding how collective materials properties emerge from interactions between simple constituents. Here, we introduce a coarse-grained model that enables simulation of networks of actin filaments, myosin…
Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
Cell adhesion, a fundamental process of cell biology is involved in the embryo development and in numerous pathologies especially those related to cancers. We constrained cells to adhere on extracellular matrix proteins patterned in a micro…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…