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Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
Micron-scale single crystalline materials deform plastically via large intermittent strain bursts that make the deformation process unpredictable. Here we investigate this stochastic phenomenon by analysing the plastic response of an…
Embryonic tissues deform across broad spatial and temporal scales and relax stress through active rearrangements. A quantitative link between cell-scale activity, spatial forcing, and emergent tissue-scale mechanics remains incomplete.…
Obstructions influence the growth and expansion of bodies in a wide range of settings -- but isolating and understanding their impact can be difficult in complex environments. Here, we study obstructed growth/expansion in a model system…
Bacteria often develop distinct phenotypes to adapt to environmental stress. In particular, they can produce biofilms, dense communities of bacteria that live in a complex extracellular matrix. Bacterial biofilms provide a safe haven from…
Biological systems are majorly dependent on their property of bistability in order to exhibit nongenetic heterogeneity in terms of cellular morphology and physiology. Spatial patterns of phenotypically heterogeneous cells, arising due to…
Intracellular protein patterns govern essential cellular functions by dynamically redistributing proteins between membrane-bound and cytosolic states, conserving their total numbers. This review presents a theoretical framework for…
Proliferation is a defining feature of life. Through growth, division, and death, living systems consume energy and inject mass, breaking conservation laws and driving collective phenomena from biofilm formation to embryonic development.…
Numerical simulations of thin sheets undergoing large deformations are computationally challenging. Depending on the scenario, they may spontaneously buckle, wrinkle, fold, or crumple. Nature's thin tissues often experience significant…
Stress propagation in nonlinear media is crucial in cell biology, where molecular motors exert anisotropic force dipoles on the fibrous cytoskeleton. While the force dipoles can be either contractile or expansile, a medium made of fibers…
We show that the formation of membrane tubes (or membrane tethers), which is a crucial step in many biological processes, is highly non-trivial and involves first order shape transitions. The force exerted by an emerging tube is a…
Formation of bacterial colonies as biofilm on the surface/interface of various objects has the potential to impact not only human health and disease but also energy and environmental considerations. Biofilms can be regarded as soft…
Understanding the rheological properties of soft biological tissue is a key issue for mechanical systems used in the healthcare field. We propose a simple empirical model using Fractional Dynamics and Exponential Nonlinearity (FDEN) to…
Despite significant advances in understanding neuronal development, a fully quantitative framework that integrates intracellular mechanisms with environmental cues during axonal growth remains incomplete. Here, we present a unified…
An elastic bilayer, consisting of an equibiaxially pre-stretched sheet bonded to a stress-free one, spontaneously morphs into curved shapes in the absence of external loads or constraints. Using experiments and numerical simulations, we…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a tendency to maintain a preferred state of tensile stress, known as tensional homeostasis, which is restored even after external mechanical stimuli. This macroscopic behavior can be described using the…
In this work lipid ordering phase changes arising in planar membrane bilayers is investigated both accounting for elas- ticity alone and for effective viscoelastic response of such assemblies. The mechanical response of such membranes is…
A stochastic model is used to assess the effect of external parameters on the development of submerged biofilms on smooth and rough surfaces. The model includes basic cellular mechanisms, such as division and spreading, together with an…
We explain the origins of yield stress, shear-thinning, and normal stress differences in rigid fiber suspensions. We investigate the interplay between the hydrodynamic, colloidal attractive and repulsive, and inter-fiber contact…
Hydrogels of semiflexible biopolymers such as collagen have been shown to contract axially under shear strain, in contrast to the axial dilation observed for most elastic materials. Recent work has shown that this behavior can be understood…