Related papers: Quantifying material properties of cell monolayers…
Despite more than 100 years of study, it is unclear if the movement of proteins inside the cell is best described as a mosh pit or an exquisitely choreographed dance. Recent studies suggest the latter. Local interactions induce molecular…
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…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
Crystal defects crucially influence the properties of crystalline materials and have been extensively studied. Even for the simplest type of defect - the point defect - however, basic properties such as their diffusive behavior, and their…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we study the dynamics of a water-like TIP5P model of water in hydrophilic and hydrophobic confinement. We find that in case of extreme nanocofinement such that there is only one molecular layer of water…
Studying the atomic structure of intrinsic defects in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides is difficult since they damage quickly under the intense electron irradiation in transmission electron microscopy (TEM). However, this…
Crystalline assemblages of identical sub-units packed together and elastically bent in the form of a torus have been found in the past ten years in a variety of systems of surprisingly different nature, such as viral capsids, self-assembled…
We use an atomistic approach to study the electronic properties of monolayer and bilayer black phosphorus in the vicinity of a charged defect. In particular, we combine screened defect potentials obtained from first-principles linear…
Abundant in nature, colloids also find increasingly important applications in science and technology, ranging from direct probing of kinetics in crystals and glasses to fabrication of third-generation quantum-dot solar cells. Because…
Topological defects play a central role in the formation and organization of various biological systems. Historically, such nonequilibrium defects have been mainly studied in the context of homogeneous active nematics. Phase-separated…
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…
Near-interface colloidal monolayers have often been used as model systems for research on hydrodynamics in biophysics and microfluidic systems. Using optical microscopy and multiparticle tracking techniques, the correlated diffusion of…
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…
The elastic properties of a self-assembled bilayer membrane are studied using the self-consistent field theory, applied to a model system composed of flexible amphiphilic chains dissolved in hydrophilic polymeric solvents. Examining the…
Tissue dynamics and collective cell motion are crucial biological processes. Their biological machinery is mostly known, and simulation models such as the "active vertex model" (AVM) exist and yield reasonable agreement with experimental…
Topological defects are a ubiquitous phenomenon in diverse physical systems. In nematic liquid crystals (LCs), they are dynamic, physicochemically distinct, sensitive to stimuli, and are thereby promising for a range of applications.…
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth in understanding of the pivotal roles of mechanical stresses and physical forces in cell biology. As a result an integrated view of cell biology is evolving, where genetic and molecular features…
Defects, and in particular topological defects, are architectural motifs that play a crucial role in natural materials. Here we provide a systematic strategy to introduce such defects in mechanical metamaterials. We first present…
Defects can strongly influence the electronic, optical and mechanical properties of 2D materials, making defect stability under different thermodynamic conditions crucial for material-property engineering. In this paper, we present an…
We demonstrate scaffolding of plasmonic nanoparticles by topological defects induced by colloidal microspheres to match their surface boundary conditions with a uniform far-field alignment in a liquid crystal host. Displacing energetically…