Related papers: Contour models of cellular adhesion
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…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the mechanical relaxation of cells within a curved epithelial tissue layer represented by an arbitrary curve in two-dimensional space. This model generalises previous one-dimensional models…
Actin and myosin drive many instances of force generation, deformation, and shape change in cells, tissues, and organisms. In particular, cytoskeletal actomyosin is remarkable in its adaptive architecture, responding to a host of…
Many closed-cell foams exhibit an elongated cell shape in the foam rise direction, resulting in anisotropic compressive properties. Nevertheless, the underlying deformation mechanisms and how cell shape anisotropy induces this mechanical…
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
In this paper, we introduce a three-dimensional mathematical model of collagen contraction with microbuckling based on the two-dimensional model previously developed by the authors. The model both qualitatively and quantitatively replicates…
We suggest a 3D phase field model to describe 3D cell spreading on a flat substrate. The model is a simplified version of a minimal model that was developed in [1]. Our model couples the order parameter $u$ with 3D polarization…
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…
Migration of animal cells is based on the interplay between actin polymerization at the front, adhesion along the cell-substrate interface, and actomyosin contractility at the back. Active gel theory has been used before to demonstrate that…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Eukaryotic cells intrinsically change their shape, by changing the composition of their membrane and by restructuring their underlying cytoskeleton. We present here further studies and extensions of a minimal physical model, describing a…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
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…
The interface dynamics of a 3D cell immersed in a 3D extracellular matrix is investigated. We suggest a 3D generalization of a known 2D minimal phase field model suggested in [1] for the description of keratocyte motility. Our model…
We demonstrate how concepts of statistical mechanics of interacting particles can have important implications in the choice of interaction potentials to model qualitative properties of cell aggregates in theoretical biology. We illustrate…
To insight the relationships between the self-organizing structures of cells, such as the cell clusters, and the properties of biotissues is helpful in revealing the function and designing biomaterial. Traditional random foam model neglects…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…