Related papers: Mechanical interplay between cell shape and actin …
The cell membrane deforms during endocytosis to surround extracellular material and draw it into the cell. Experiments on endocytosis in yeast all agree that (i) actin polymerizes into a network of filaments exerting active forces on the…
Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…
Structure formation and constant reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton are key requirements for the function of living cells. Here we show that a minimal reconstituted system consisting of actin filaments, crosslinking molecules and…
The optimal shapes attained by contractile cells on adhesive substrates are determined by the interplay between intracellular forces and adhesion with the extracellular matrix. We model the cell as a contractile film bounded by an elastic…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Autophagy is a conserved biological stress response in mammalian cells that is responsible for clearing damaged proteins and organelles from the cytoplasm and recycling their contents via the lysosomal pathway. In cases of mild stress,…
The actin cytoskeleton of adherent tissue cells often condenses into filament bundles contracted by myosin motors, so-called stress fibers, which play a crucial role in the mechanical interaction of cells with their environment. Stress…
Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…
The dynamics of active viscoelastic surfaces plays an important role in biological systems. One prominent example is the actin cortex, a thin bio-polymer sheet underneath the outer membrane of biological cells which combines active…
Actin and myosin assemble into a thin layer of a highly dynamic network underneath the membrane of eukaryotic cells. This network generates the forces that drive cell and tissue-scale morphogenetic processes. The effective material…
This work presents the development, analysis and numerical simulations of a biophysical model for 3D cell deformation and movement, which couples biochemical reactions and biomechanical forces. We propose a mechanobiochemical model which…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
The eukaryotic cell's cytoskeleton is a prototypical example of an active material: objects embedded within it are driven by molecular motors acting on the cytoskeleton, leading to anomalous diffusive behavior. Experiments tracking the…
It is widely recognized that the shape of epithelial cells is determined by the tension generated by the actomyosin cortex and the adhesion of cells to the substrate and to each other. To account for these biological and structural…
We study interactions between biological cells that apply anisotropic active mechanical forces on an elastic substrate. We model the cells as thin discs that along their perimeters apply radial, but angle-dependent forces on the substrate.…
The cytoskeleton is essential for the maintenance of cell morphology in eukaryotes. In fission yeast for example, polarized growth sites are organized by actin whereas microtubules (MT) acting upstream control where growth occurs (La…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Active matter is characterized by its ability to induce motion by self-generated stress. In the case of a solid, such motion can lead to shape transformations. The stress-generating components can be anisotropic endowing the material with…