Related papers: Quantifying material properties of cell monolayers…
Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…
We elucidate the molecular forces leading to assembly of two dimensional membrane-like structures composed of a one rod-length thick monolayer of aligned rods from an immiscible suspension of hard rods and depleting polymers. We perform…
Growth and folding in one-layered model tissue sheets are studied in a stochastic, lattice-free single cell model which considers the discrete cellular structure of the tissue, and a coarse grained analytical approach. The polarity of the…
Defects are a ubiquitous feature of ordered media. They have certain universal features, independent of the underlying physical system, reflecting their topological origins. While the topological properties of defects are robust, they…
In many tissues, cell type varies over single-cell length-scales, creating detailed spatial heterogeneities fundamental to physiological function. To gain understanding of this relationship between tissue function and detailed structure,…
Fluids with spatial density variations of single or mixed molecules play a key role in biophysics, soft matter and materials science. The fluid structures usually form via spinodal decomposition or nucleation following an instantaneous…
van der Waals stacking of two-dimensional (2D) materials offers a powerful platform for engineering material interfaces with tailored electronic and optical properties. While most van der Waals multilayers have featured inorganic…
Recent experiments on monolayers of spindle-like cells plated on adhesive stripe-shaped domains have provided a convincing demonstration that certain types of collective phenomena in epithelia are well described by active nematic…
We propose a general formalism to characterize orientational frustration of smectic liquid crystals in confinement by interpreting the emerging networks of grain boundaries as objects with a topological charge. In a formal idealization,…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
We study the stress distribution profiles and the height and thickness fluctuations of lipid membranes in the tilted gel state by Monte Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid membranes, which reproduces many known…
The assembly of colloidal particles at liquid/liquid or air/liquid interfaces is a versatile procedure to create microstructured monolayers and study their behavior under compression. When combined with soft and deformable particles such as…
Manipulating fluids at the nanoscale within networks of channels or chemical lanes is a crucial challenge in developing small scale devices to be used in microreactors or chemical sensors. In this context, ultra-thin (i.e., monolayer)…
The ability to design and fabricate materials with tailored mechanical properties, combined with immunity to damage, is a frontier of materials engineering. For example, materials which are characterized by elastic properties that depend on…
Recent advances recognize that the viscoelastic properties of epithelial structures play important roles in biology and disease modeling. However, accessing the viscoelastic properties of multicellular structures in mechanistic or…
Liquid crystals (LCs) form an extremely rich range of self-assembled topological structures with artificially or naturally created topological defects. Some of the main applications of LCs are various optical and photonic devices, where…
Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…
Systematic engineering of atomic-scale low-dimensional defects in two-dimensional nanomaterials is a promising way to modulate the electronic properties of these nanomaterials. Defects at interfaces such as grain boundaries and line defects…
A model for a monolayer of two types of particles spontaneously forming ordered patterns is studied by a mesoscopic theory and by MC simulations. We assume hard-cores of the same size for both components, short-range attraction long-range…
Recent experiments suggest that the interplay between cells and the mechanics of their substrate gives rise to a diversity of morphological and migrational behaviors. Here, we develop a Cellular Potts Model of polarizing cells on a…