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

Native membranes of biological cells display melting transitions of their lipids at a temperature of 10-20 degrees below body temperature. Such transitions can be observed in various bacterial cells, in nerves, in cancer cells, but also in…

Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…

The vertex model is widely used to describe the dynamics of epithelial tissues, because of its simplicity and versatility and the direct inclusion of biophysical parameters. Here, it is shown that quite generally, when cells modify their…

Soft machines display shape adaptation to external circumstances due to their intrinsic compliance. To achieve increasingly more responsive behaviors upon interactions without relying on centralized computation, embodying memory directly in…

As small particles skim our airways during breathing, or our intestines during digestion, the surface epithelium is subjected to local exogenous shear that deforms hundreds to thousands of tightly interacting cells. Unlike shear…

To accelerate the development of strategies for cartilage tissue engineering, models are necessary to study the interactions between cellular dynamics and scaffold (SC) porosity. In experiments, cells are seeded in a porous SC where over a…

We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…

The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…

Cells contain elaborate and interconnected networks of protein polymers which make up the cytoskeleton. The cytoskeleton governs the internal positioning and movement of vesicles and organelles, and controls dynamic changes in cell…

We study synchronization of two cardiomyocytes mediated by elastic interactions through the substrate. Modeling each cell as an oscillating force dipole governed by a Rayleigh-type equation, we derive an effective mechanical coupling from…

Small magnetic particles placed in a relatively soft polymer (with elastic modulus E ~ 10-100 kPa) are magnetically soft elastomers. The external magnetic field acts on each particle which leads to microscopic deformation of the material…

Cells and tissues change shape both to carry out their function and during pathology. In most cases, these deformations are driven from within the systems themselves. This is permitted by a range of molecular actors, such as active…

The construction of a network of cell-to-cell contacts makes it possible to characterize the patterns and spatial organisation of tissues. Such networks are highly dynamic, depending on the changes of the tissue architecture caused by cell…

Interaction of electric fields with biological cells is indispensable for many physiological processes. Thermal electrical noise in the cellular environment has long been considered as the minimum threshold for detection of electrical…

In biological settings membranes typically interact locally with other membranes or the extracellular matrix in the exterior, as well as with internal cellular structures such as the cytoskeleton. Characterization of the dynamic properties…

Cell neighbor exchanges play a critical role in regulating tissue fluidity during epithelial morphogenesis and repair. In vivo, these neighbor exchanges are often hindered by the formation of transiently stable four-fold vertices, which can…

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…

A hallmark of biological tissues, viewed as complex cellular materials, is the active generation of mechanical stresses by cellular processes, such as cell divisions. Each cellular event generates a force dipole that deforms the surrounding…

Cell membrane tension directly influences various cellular functions. In this study, we developed a method to estimate surface tension from time-series data. We obtained the curvature-velocity relationship from time-series of binarized cell…

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…