Related papers: Mechanochemical induction of wrinkling morphogenes…
Across development, the morphology of fluid-filled lumina enclosed by epithelial tissues arises from an interplay of lumen pressure, mechanics of the cell cortex, and cell-cell adhesion. Here, we explore the mechanical basis for the control…
Since the lipid raft model was developed at the end of the last century, it became clear that the specific molecular arrangements of phospholipid assemblies within a membrane have profound implications in a vast range of physiological…
The macroscopic mechanical properties of colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles. Experiments have shown that more heterogeneous microstructures exhibit up to one order of magnitude higher…
We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
We developed a physics-based analytical model to describe the nonlinear mechanical response of aspirated elastic shells. By representing the elastic energy through a stretching modulus, $K$, and a dimensionless ratio, $\delta$, capturing…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
Collective behaviors in cellular systems are regulated not only by biochemical signalling pathways but also by intercellular mechanical forces, whose quantification in contractile monolayers remains poorly understood. Here, by integrating…
For the first time the phenomenon of cellular structure coarsening are consistently analysed from the positions of kinetic, hydrodynamic and stochastodynamic theories of nonequilibrium statistical systems. Thereby micro-, meso- and…
We investigate how thin structures change their shape in response to non-mechanical stimuli that can be interpreted as variations in the structure's natural curvature. Starting from the theory of non-Euclidean plates and shells, we derive…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
The dynamics of cellular aggregates is driven by the interplay of mechanochemical processes and cellular activity. Although deterministic models may capture mechanical features, local chemical fluctuations trigger random cell responses,…
Cell motility is one of the most fundamental phenomena underlying biological processes that maintain living organisms alive. Here we introduce a simple model to describe the motility of cells which include not only time-correlated internal…
The rheological properties of biological tissues are core to processes such as cancer metastasis, wound healing and embryo development. The emergence of tissue and organ structures during morphogenesis requires the precise formation of…
We discuss a class of models for particulate gels in which the particle contacts are described by an effective interaction combining a two-body attraction and a three-body angular repulsion. Using molecular dynamics, we show how varying the…
A connection is established between discrete stochastic model describing microscopic motion of fluctuating cells, and macroscopic equations describing dynamics of cellular density. Cells move towards chemical gradient (process called…
Endothelial cells are responsible for the formation of the capillary blood vessel network. We describe a system of endothelial cells by means of two-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of point-like particles. Cells' motion is…
We reveal that the mechanical pulsation of locally synchronised particles is a generic route to propagate deformation waves. We consider a model of dense repulsive particles whose activity drives periodic change in size of each individual.…
Cell shape is linked to cell function. The significance of cell morphodynamics, namely the temporal fluctuation of cell shape, is much less understood. Here we study the morphodynamics of MDA-MB-231 cells in type I collagen extracellular…