Related papers: What do cells regulate in soft tissues on short ti…

Biological systems, with many interacting components, face high-dimensional environmental fluctuations, ranging from diverse nutrient deprivations to toxins, drugs, and physical stresses. Yet, many biological control mechanisms are `simple'…

Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…

To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…

While mechanobiology has demonstrated that precise control over mechanical properties at the whole-cell level is crucial for many biological functions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the intracellular mechanical properties.…

Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…

Bacterial colonies growing on surfaces are shaped by mechanical stresses transmitted through the community, governed by the balance between cell growth and steric and cell-substrate interactions. Using overdamped dynamics simulations of…

Adhering cells actively probe the mechanical properties of their environment and use the resulting information to position and orient themselves. We show that a large body of experimental observations can be consistently explained from one…

Cells actively regulate their size during the cell cycle to maintain volume homeostasis across generations. While various mathematical models of cell size regulation have been proposed to explain how this is achieved, relating these models…

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,…

Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…

We study the surface fluctuations of a tissue with a dynamics dictated by cell-rearrangement, cell-division, and cell-death processes. Surface fluctuations are calculated in the homeostatic state, where cell division and cell death…

There is increasing interest in the analysis of biological tissue, its organization and its dynamics with the help of mathematical models. In the ideal case emergent properties on the tissue scale can be derived from the cellular scale.…

Organisms maintain the status quo, holding key physiological variables constant to within an acceptable tolerance, and yet adapt with precision and plasticity to dynamic changes in externalities. What organizational principles ensure such…

The actin cortex is a thin layer of actin, myosin, and actin binding proteins that underlies the membrane of most animal cells. It is highly dynamic and can undergo remodelling on time-scales of tens of seconds thanks to protein turnover…

Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…

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…

Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…

The macroscopic behaviour of active matter arises from nonequilibrium microscopic processes. In soft materials, active stresses typically drive macroscopic shape changes, which in turn alter the geometry constraining the microscopic…

The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…

Homeostasis, broadly speaking, refers to the maintenance of a stable internal state when faced with external stimuli. Failure to manage these regulatory processes can lead to different diseases or death. Most physiologists and cell…