Related papers: Controlled neighbor exchanges drive glassy behavio…
Understanding the influence of activity on dense amorphous assemblies is crucial for biological processes such as wound healing, embryogenesis, or cancer progression. Here, we study the effect of self-propulsion forces of amplitude $f_0$…
The construction of a network of cell-to-cell contacts makes it possible to characterize the patterns and spatial organisation of tissues. Such networks are highly dynamic, depending on the changes of the tissue architecture caused by cell…
Single cells often generate precise responses by involving dissipative out-of-thermodynamic equilibrium processes in signaling networks. The available free energy to fuel these processes could become limited depending on the metabolic state…
Collective cell migration in epithelia relies on cell intercalation: a local remodelling of the cellular network that allows neighbouring cells to swap their positions. Unlike foams and passive cellular fluid, in epithelial intercalation…
Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…
We investigate the effects of cell division and apopotosis on collective dynamics in two-dimensional epithelial tissues. Our model includes three key ingredients observed across many epithelia, namely cell-cell adhesion, cell death and a…
How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solid-like to a fluid-like state or vice versa. Here, we introduce a new way for…
Biological tissues exhibit complex behaviors with their dynamics often resembling inert soft matter such as liquids, polymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. These analogies enable physics-based approaches for investigations of emergent…
The glass transition is considered within two toys models, a mean field spin glass and a directed polymer in a correlated random potential. In the spin glass model there occurs a dynamical transition, where the system condenses in a state…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
Convergence-extension in embryos is controlled by chemical and mechanical signalling. A key cellular process is the exchange of neighbours via T1 transitions. We propose and analyse a model with positive feedback between recruitment of…
Key to collective cell migration is the ability of cells to rearrange their position with respect to their neighbors. Recent theory and experiments demonstrated that cellular rearrangements are facilitated by cell shape, with cells having…
Many physical systems exhibit plastic flow when subjected to slow steady shear. A unified picture of plastic flow is still lacking; however, there is an emerging theoretical understanding of such flows based on irreversible motions of the…
Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
The coupling of active, self-motile particles to topological constraints can give rise to novel non-equilibrium dynamical patterns that lack any passive counterpart. Here we study the behavior of self-propelled rods confined to a compact…
Fluctuating pairwise interactions are understood to drive fluid-like states in dense biological systems. These states find a broad range of functionalities, such as directing growth during morphogenesis and forming aggregates with…
Vertex models are a popular approach to modeling the mechanical and dynamical properties of dense biological tissues, describing the tissue as a network of connected polygons representing the cells. Recently a class of two-dimensional…
Epithelial cell tissues have a slow relaxation dynamics resembling that of supercooled liquids. Yet, they also have distinguishing features. These include an extended short-time sub-diffusive transient, as observed in some experiments and…
The organization of live cells to tissues is associated with the mechanical interaction between cells, which is mediated through their elastic environment. We model cells as spherical active force dipoles surrounded by an infinite elastic…
The dramatic slowdown of dynamics in supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition remains one of the central unresolved problems in condensed matter physics. We review approaches that attribute this slowdown to growing thermodynamic…