Related papers: Mean-field interactions between living cells in li…
There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…
Shapes of biological membranes are dynamically regulated in living cells. Although membrane shape deformation by proteins at thermal equilibrium has been extensively studied, nonequilibrium dynamics have been much less explored. Recently,…
Cell mechanical functions like locomotion, contraction and division are controlled by the cytoskeleton, a dynamic biopolymer network whose mechanical properties remain poorly understood. We perform single-cell uniaxial stretching…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…
This study investigates the relationship between cell shape and cell-generated stresses in confluent cell layers. Using simultaneous measurements of cell shape orientation and cell-generated contractile forces in MDCK and LP-9 colonies, we…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
Coordinated movements of epithelia tissue are linked with active matter processes. We here consider the influence of curvature on the spatiotemporal arrangements and the shapes of the cells. The cells are represented by a multiphase field…
Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…
To develop a minimal model for a cell moving in a crowded environment such as in tissue, we investigate the response of a liquid drop of active matter moving on a flat rigid substrate to forces applied at its boundaries. We consider two…
We present a single, unified, multi-scale model to study the attachment\detachment dynamics of two deforming, near spherical cells, coated with binding ligands and subject to a slow, homogeneous shear flow in a viscous fluid medium. The…
A general description of elastic matter and the long-range elastic interaction is propose. The type of the far-field interaction is determined by the way of breaking in the continuum distribution of the elastic field produced by topological…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
Eukaryotic cells adhere to extracellular matrix during the normal development of the organism, forming static adhesion as well as during cell motility. We study this process by considering a simplified coarse-grained model of a vesicle that…
A shape sensitive, variational approach for the matching of surfaces considered as thin elastic shells is investigated. The elasticity functional to be minimized takes into account two different types of nonlinear energies: a membrane…
A flat sheet programmed with a planar pattern of spontaneous shape change will morph into a curved surface. Such metric mechanics is seen in growing biological sheets, and may be engineered in actuating soft matter sheets such as…
The behavior of an elastic curve bound to a surface will reflect the geometry of its environment. This may occur in an obvious way: the curve may deform freely along directions tangent to the surface, but not along the surface normal.…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…
To go beyond the simple model for the fold as two flexible surfaces or faces linked by a crease that behaves as an elastic hinge, we carefully shape and anneal a crease within a polymer sheet and study its mechanical response. First, we…
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…