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Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
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…
The endpoint slippage analysis can be used to quantify the reduction and oxidation side-reactions occurring in rechargeable batteries. Application of this technique often disregards the interference of additional aging modes, such as…
We examine the mechanism of bundling of cytoskeletal actin filaments by two representative bundling proteins, fascin and espin. Small-angle X-ray studies show that increased binding from linkers drives a systematic \textit{overtwist} of…
Photoelasticity is employed to investigate the stress state near stiff rectangular and rhombohedral inclusions embedded in a 'soft' elastic plate. Results show that the singular stress field predicted by the linear elastic solution for the…
When a less viscous Newtonian fluid displaces an aging aqueous clay suspension in a confined space, a rich array of interfacial patterns emerges due to a predominantly viscous instability. In the present work, we controlled the mechanical…
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…
Finite element methods are used to study non-adhesive, frictionless contact between elastic solids with self-affine surfaces. We find that the total contact area rises linearly with load at small loads. The mean pressure in the contact…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
Through tridimensonal numerical simulations of crack propagating in material with an elastic moduli heterogeneity it is shown that the presence of a simple inclusion can affect dramatically the propagation of the crack. Both the presence of…
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…
Multicellular organisms consist of cells that interact via elaborate adhesion complexes. Desmosomes are membrane-associated adhesion complexes that mechanically tether the cytoskeletal intermediate filaments (IFs) between two adjacent…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
The magnetic flux trapping in type-II superconductor containing fractal clusters of a normal phase, which act as pinning centers, is considered. The critical current distribution for an arbitrary fractal dimension of the boundaries of the…
Composites of flexible and rigid polymers are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, yet the physical principles determining their mechanical properties are far from understood. Here, we couple force spectroscopy with large-scale…
Receptor-ligand binding is a critical first step in signal transduction and the duration of the interaction can impact signal generation. In mammalian cells, clustering of receptors may be facilitated by heterogeneous zones of lipids, known…
Mobility properties inside and around degenerate domains of an elastic lattice partially pinned on a square array of traps are explored by means of a fully controllable model system of macroscopic particles. We focus on the different…
The sliding of three-dimensional clusters and two-dimensional islands adsorbed on crystal surfaces represent an important test case to understand friction. Even for the same material, monoatomic islands and thick clusters will not as a rule…
Myosin II isoforms with varying mechanochemistry and filament size interact with filamentous actin (F-actin) networks to generate contractile forces in cells. How their properties control force production in environments with varying…