Related papers: Confinement-induced self-organization in growing b…

Cell migration in confining physiological environments relies on the concerted dynamics of several cellular components, including protrusions, adhesions with the environment, and the cell nucleus. However, it remains poorly understood how…

Microorganisms, such as bacteria and microalgae, often live in habitats consisting of a liquid phase and a plethora of interfaces. The precise ways in which these motile microbes behave in their confined environment remain unclear. Using…

In this paper, we model the configurations of a system of hard rods by viewing each rod in a cell formed by its neighbors. By minimizing the free energy in the model and performing molecular dynamics, where, in both cases, the shape of the…

Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…

Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…

Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…

We investigate the mechanical behavior of a confined granular packing of irregular polyhedral particles under repeated heating and cooling cycles by means of numerical simulations with the Non-Smooth Contact Dynamics method. Assuming a…

As a paradigmatic model of active fluids, bacterial suspensions show intriguing rheological responses drastically different from their counterpart colloidal suspensions. Although the flow of bulk bacterial suspensions has been extensively…

Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…

Coarsening, the process where larger structures grow at the expense of smaller ones, is a fundamental aspect of multiphase systems. The cell cytoplasm exemplifies an out-of-equilibrium multiphase system, where phase-separated condensates…

Bacterial growth and division generally occur by the process known as binary fission, in which the cells grow polarly until they divide into two daughter cells. Although this process is affected by factors that introduce stochastic…

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…

The role of boundary layers in conventional liquid crystals is commonly subsumed in their anchoring on confining walls. In the classical view, anchoring enslaves the orientational field of the passive material under equilibrium conditions.…

At low temperatures, colloidal particles with short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions can form various periodic microphases in bulk.In this paper, we investigate the self-assembly behaviour of colloids with competing…

The study of spindle-like cells as nematic liquid crystals has led to remarkable insights in the understanding of tissue organization and morphogenesis. In the characterization of this anomalous liquid crystal material, we focus on the…

Pattern formation often occurs in confined systems, yet how boundaries shape patterning dynamics is unclear. We develop techniques to analyze confinement effects in nonlocal advection-diffusion equations, which generically capture the…

We study the effect of discreteness on various models for patterning in bacterial colonies. In a bacterial colony with branching pattern, there are discrete entities - bacteria - which are only two orders of magnitude smaller than the…

Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…

We study the combined effects of nonlocal elasticity and confinement induced ordering on the dynamics of thermomolecular pressure gradient driven premelted films bound by an elastic membrane. The confinement induced ordering is modeled…

Various bacterial strains exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor substrates. These patterns reflect bacterial cooperative self-organization and cybernetic processes of communication, regulation and control employed during…