Related papers: Sculpting vesicles with active particles: Less is …
Shape transformations of flat bilayer membranes and vesicles induced by hydrolysis and condensation reactions of amphiphilic molecules are studied using coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. The hydrolysis and condensation…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…
The shapes of cell membranes are largely regulated by membrane associated, curvature active, proteins. We use a numerical model of the membrane with elongated membrane inclusions, recently developed by us, which posses spontaneous…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
Bilayer membranes self-assembled from simple amphiphiles in solution always have a planar ground-state shape. This is a consequence of several internal relaxation mechanisms of the membrane and prevents the straightforward control of…
Biofilms are complex, self-organized consortia of microorganisms that produce a functional, protective matrix of biomolecules. Physically, the structure of a biofilm can be described as an entangled polymer network which grows and changes…
Due to the potential applications in biomedical engineering, it becomes more and more important to understand the process of engulfment and internalization of nanoparticles (NPs) by cell membranes. Despite the fact that the interaction…
Biological systems excel at building spatial structures on scales ranging from nanometers to kilometers and exhibit temporal patterning from milliseconds to years. One approach that nature has taken to accomplish this relies on the…
Vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers exhibit a wide diversity of behavior upon electroporation, due to competitions between edge, surface and bending energies that drive the system, while different viscous dissipation…
Brain organoids recapitulate a number of brain properties, including neuronal diversity. However, do they recapitulate brain structure? Using a hydrodynamic description for cell nuclei as particles interacting initially via an effective,…
Many embryonic deformations during development are the global result of local cell shape changes and other local active cell sheet deformations. Morphogenesis does not only therefore rely on the ability of the tissue to produce these active…
Membrane tubulation is a ubiquitous process that occurs both at the plasma membrane and on the membranes of intracellular organelles. These tubulation events are known to be mediated by forces applied on the membrane either due to motor…
In this paper, we present a 2D numerical model developed to simulate the dynamics of soft, deformable particles. To accommodate significant particle deformations, the particle surface is represented as a narrow shell composed of mass points…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
A number of factors, such as, cell-cell interactions and self-propulsion of cells driven by cytoskeletal forces determine tissue morphologies and dynamics. To explore the interplay between these factors in controlling the dynamics at the…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…