Related papers: Buckling without bending morphogenesis: Nonlineari…

We consider mechanically-induced pattern formation within the framework of a growing, planar, elastic rod attached to an elastic foundation. Through a combination of weakly nonlinear analysis and numerical methods, we identify how the shape…

Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…

Modeling the spontaneous evolution of morphology in natural systems and its preservation by proportionate growth remains a major scientific challenge. Yet, it is conceivable that if the basic mechanisms of growth and the coupled kinetic…

During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…

A notable feature of the elephant trunk is the pronounced wrinkling that enables its great flexibility. Here, we devise a general mathematical model that accounts for the characteristic skin wrinkles formed during morphogenesis in the…

We investigate the elasticity of unsupported epithelial monolayer and we discover that unlike a thin solid plate, which wrinkles if geometrically incompatible with the underlying substrate, the epithelium may do so even in absence of the…

Nonlinear stiffening is a ubiquitous property of major types of biopolymers that make up the extracellular matrices (ECM) including collagen, fibrin and basement membrane. Within the ECM, many types of cells such as fibroblasts and cancer…

We model the formation and evolution of wrinkles in a floating elastic sheet under uniaxial compression. This is a canonical setup in the study of wrinkling, and whilst its static equilibrium configuration is well characterised, its…

The shapes of epithelial tissues result from a complex interplay of contractile forces in the cytoskeleta of the cells in the tissue, and adhesion forces between them. A host of discrete, cell-based models describe these forces by assigning…

Quantification of brain morphology has become an important cornerstone in understanding brain structure. Measures of cortical morphology such as thickness and surface area are frequently used to compare groups of subjects or characterise…

Deformations of cell sheets during morphogenesis are driven by developmental processes such as cell division and cell shape changes. In morphoelastic shell theories of development, these processes appear as variations of the intrinsic…

In this study we give a geometrical model which employs the smoothness of nerve fibers as differentiable curves. We show that a nerve fiber may encounter large curvature due to the possible helicial bending and hence it could cause the…

Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…

The buckling of elastic bodies is a common phenomenon in the mechanics of solids. Wrinkling of membranes can often be interpreted as buckling under constraints that prohibit large amplitude deformation. We present a combination of analytic…

Spatially confined rigid membranes reorganize their morphology in response to the imposed constraints. A crumpled elastic sheet presents a complex pattern of random folds focusing the deformation energy while compressing a membrane resting…

In growing plant cells, parallel ordering of microtubules (MTs) along the inner surface of the cell membrane influences the direction of cell expansion and thereby plant morphology. For correct expansion of organs that primarily grow by…

Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…

The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…

Thin elastic sheets bend easily, leading to mechanical instabilities such as wrinkling. Here, we investigate wrinkles at edges of bi-strips, which consist of two thin sheets, one that swells and one that does not, joined side-by-side. It is…

Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…