Related papers: Modelling Micropipette Aspiration with Active Part…
Spherical cellular aggregates are in vitro systems to study the physical and biophysical properties of tissues. We present a novel approach to characterize the mechanical properties of cellular aggregates using micropipette aspiration…
Many soft biological tissues possess a considerable surface stress, which plays a significant role in their biophysical functions, but most previous methods for characterizing their mechanical properties have neglected the effects of…
We present a detailed analysis of the micropipet experiments recently reported in J-B. Manneville et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 4356--4359 (1999), including a derivation of the expected behaviour of the membrane tension as a function of the…
We propose a three dimensional mechanical model of embryonic tissue dynamics. Mechanically coupled adherent cells are represented as particles interconnected with elastic beams which can exert non-central forces and torques. Tissue…
We propose a model for membrane-cortex adhesion which couples membrane deformations, hydrodynamics and kinetics of membrane-cortex ligands. In its simplest form, the model gives explicit predictions for the critical pressure for membrane…
Tuning of active prestress e.g. through activity of molecular motors constitutes a powerful cellular tool to adjust cellular stiffness through nonlinear material properties. Understanding this tool is an important prerequisite for our…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
We introduce a model for describing the dynamics of large numbers of interacting cells. The fundamental dynamical variables in the model are sub-cellular elements, which interact with each other through phenomenological intra- and…
Cellular tissue behavior is a multiscale problem. At the cell level, out of equilibrium, biochemical reactions drive physical cell-cell interactions in a typical active matter process. Cell modeling computer simulations are a robust tool to…
We show that the atomic force microscope can perform stress relaxation and creep compliance measurements on living cells. We propose a method to obtain the mechanical properties of the studied biomaterial: the relaxation time, the elastic…
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…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…
A model of multicellular systems with several types of cells is developed from the phase field model. The model is presented as a set of partial differential equations of the field variables, each of which expresses the shape of one cell.…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
We consider a multiscale approach based on immersed methods for the efficient computational modeling of tissues composed of an elastic matrix (in two or three-dimensions) and a thin vascular structure (treated as a co-dimension two…
Biophysical models describing complex, cellular phenomena typically include systems of nonlinear differential equations with many free parameters. While experimental measurements can fix some parameters, those describing internal cellular…
The internal dynamics of active gels, both in artificial (in-vitro) model systems and inside the cytoskeleton of living cells, has been extensively studied by experiments of recent years. These dynamics are probed using tracer particles…
Previous work introduced a lower-dimensional numerical model for the geometric nonlinear simulation and optimization of compliant pressure actuated cellular structures. This model takes into account hinge eccentricities as well as…
The living cell expends energetic and material resources to reliably process information from its environment. To do so, it utilises unreliable molecular circuitry that is subject to thermal and other fluctuations. Here, we argue that…