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Under dehydration conditions, amphipathic Late Embryogenesis Abundant (LEA) proteins fold spontaneously from a random conformation into alpha-helical structures and this transition is promoted by the presence of membranes. To gain insight…
We study dynamics of a membrane and its matrix regularisation. We present the matrix regularisation for a membrane propagating in a curved space-time geometry in the presence of an arbitrary 3-form field. In the matrix regularisation, we…
In many adult tissues, stem cells and differentiated cells are not homogeneously distributed : stem cells are arranged in periodic "niches", and differentiated cells are constantly produced and migrate out of these niches. In this article,…
Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
The interaction between actin filaments and microtubules is crucial for many eukaryotic cellular processes, such as, among others, cell polarization, cell motility and cellular wound healing. The importance of this interaction has long been…
Crawling cell motility is vital to many biological processes such as wound healing and the immune response. Using a minimal model we investigate the effects of patterned substrate adhesiveness and biophysical cell parameters on the…
We study theoretically the phase diagram of compressible active polar gels such as the actin network of eukaryotic cells. Using generalized hydrodynamics equations, we perform a linear stability analysis of the uniform states in the case of…
The actin cortex is an active biopolymer network underneath the plasma membrane at the periphery of mammalian cells. It is a major regulator of cell shape through the generation of active cortical tension. In addition, the cortex…
We propose a model solely based on actin treadmilling and polymerisation which describes many characteristic states of actin wave formation: spots, spirals and travelling waves. In our model, as in experiments on cell recovering motility…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
Mammalian cell polarization and motility are important processes involved in many physiological and pathological phenomena, such as embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. The traditional view of mammalian cell motility…
We study force generation by a set of parallel actin filaments growing against a non-rigid obstacle, in presence of an external load. The filaments polymerize by either moving the whole obstacle, with a large energy cost, or by causing…
Biochemistry and mechanics are closely coupled in cell adhesion. At sites of cell-matrix adhesion, mechanical force triggers signaling through the Rho-pathway, which leads to structural reinforcement and increased contractility in the actin…
We analyze the physical mechanisms leading either to synchronization or to the formation of spatio-temporal patterns in a lattice model of pulse-coupled oscillators. In order to make the system tractable from a mathematical point of view we…
The nucleus of the eukaryotic cell functions amidst active cytoskeletal filaments, but its response to the stresses carried by these filaments is largely unexplored. We report here the results of studies of the translational and rotational…
Polarity fields are known to exhibit long distance patterns, in both physical and biological systems. The mechanisms behind such patterns are poorly understood. Here, we describe the dynamics of polarity fields using an original physical…
We study the impact of an external alignment field on the structure formation and polarization behavior of low-density dipolar active particles in three dimensions. Performing extensive Brownian dynamics simulations, we characterize the…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
It is well known that periodic potentials can be used to induce freezing and melting in colloids. Here, we transfer this concept to active systems and find the emergence of a so-far unknown active matter phase in between the frozen…