Related papers: Emergent probability fluxes in confined microbial …
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
Pattern-forming nonequilibrium systems are ubiquitous in nature, from driven quantum matter and biological life forms to atmospheric and interstellar gases. Identifying universal aspects of their far-from-equilibrium dynamics and statistics…
Current mathematical frameworks for predicting the flux state and macromolecular composition of the cell do not rely on thermodynamic constraints to determine the spontaneous direction of reactions. These predictions may be biologically…
The motor part of a crawling eukaryotic cell can be represented schematically as an active continuum layer. The main active processes in this layer are protrusion, originating from non-equilibrium polymerization of actin fibers,…
We present a new numerical model to simulate settling trajectories of discretized individual or a mixture of particles of different geometrical shapes in a quiescent fluid and their flow trajectories in a flowing fluid. Simulations unveiled…
Transport properties of particles in confining geometries show very specific characteristics as lateral drift, oscillatory movement between lateral walls or the deformation of flexible fibers. These dynamics result from viscous friction…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
Directed collective cell migration is central in morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer progression1,2. Although it is well-accepted that the molecular anisotropy of the micro-environment guides this migration3,4, its impact on the pattern…
Near a solid boundary, E. coli swims in clockwise circular motion. We provide a hydrodynamic model for this behavior. We show that circular trajectories are natural consequences of force-free and torque-free swimming, and the hydrodynamic…
Understanding flow and transport of bacteria in porous media is crucial to technologies such as bioremediation, biomineralization or enhanced oil recovery. While physicochemical bacteria filtration is well-documented, recent studies showed…
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
We investigate the emergence of global alignment in colonies of dividing rod-shaped cells under confinement. Using molecular dynamics simulations and continuous modeling, we demonstrate that geometrical anisotropies in the confining…
Many types of motile cells perform durotaxis, namely, directed migration following gradients of substrate stiffness. Recent experiments have revealed that cell monolayers can migrate toward stiffer regions even when individual cells do not…
Many active fluid systems encountered in biology are set in total geometric confinement. Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells is a prominent and ubiquitous example, in which cargo-carrying molecular motors move along polymer filaments and…
This work probes the role of cell geometry in orienting self-organized fluid flows in the late stage Drosophila oocyte. Recent theoretical work has shown that a model, which relies only on hydrodynamic interactions of flexible, cortically…
The autonomous motion of liquid crystal oil droplets in micellar media arises from spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry via nonlinear coupling between Marangoni stresses and surfactant transport. While this phenomenon has been…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
Recent Molecular Dynamics simulations of glass-forming liquids revealed superdiffusive fluctuations associated with the position of a tracer particle (TP) driven by an external force. Such anomalous response, whose mechanism remains…
Cell migration is closely linked to cell shape, yet cell size is often assumed to remain constant. This assumption is challenged by recent experiments showing that cells undergo volume loss during spreading and swelling upon activation,…