Related papers: Living cells on the move

Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…

Collective migration -- the directed, coordinated motion of many self-propelled agents -- is a fascinating emergent behavior exhibited by active matter that has key functional implications for biological systems. Extensive studies have…

Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…

From biofilm and colony formation in bacteria to wound healing and embryonic development in multicellular organisms, groups of living cells must often move collectively. While considerable study has probed the biophysical mechanisms of how…

A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…

Epithelial cell clusters often move collectively on a substrate. Mechanical signals play a major role in organizing this behavior. There are a number of experimental observations in these systems which await a comprehensive explanation.…

A lattice model for active matter is studied numerically, showing that it displays wettings transitions between three distinctive phases when in contact with an impenetrable wall. The particles in the model move persistently, tumbling with…

In active matter and living matter, such as clusters of migrating cells, collective dynamics emerges from the underlying interactions. A common assumption of theoretical descriptions of collective cell migration is that these interactions…

Substrate-based cell motility is essential for fundamental biological processes, such as tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. Even if a comprehensive understanding of this motility mode remains elusive, progress has been…

Nonlinear coupling between inter- and intra-element dynamics appears as a collective behaviour of elements. The elements in this paper denote symptoms such as a bacterium having an internal network of genes and proteins, a reactive droplet,…

Clusters appear in nature in a diversity of contexts, involving distances as long as the cosmological ones, and down to atoms and molecules and the very small nuclear size. They also appear in several other scenarios, in particular in…

We study a model of flocking in order to describe the transitions during the collective motion of organisms in three dimensions (e.g., birds). In this model the particles representing the organisms are self-propelled, i.e., they move with…

Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…

Actin networks in certain single-celled organisms exhibit a complex pattern-forming dynamics that starts with the appearance of static spots of actin on the cell cortex. Spots soon become mobile, executing persistent random walks, and…

Living systems are made of active materials with microscopic components that work together to perform macroscopic biological tasks. The breakdown of these collective functionalities leads to diseases, which, conversely, could be treated by…

Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…

Processive molecular motors which drive the traffic of organelles in cells move in a directed way along cytoskeletal filaments. On large time scales, they perform motor walks, i.e., peculiar random walks which arise from the repeated…

Experiments with myxobacterial aggregates reveal standing waves called rippling patterns. Here, these structures are modelled with a simple discrete model based on the interplay between migration and collisions of cells. Head-to-head…

Traveling waves describe diverse natural phenomena from crystal growth in physics to range expansions in biology. Two classes of waves exist with very different properties: pulled and pushed. Pulled waves are driven by high growth rates at…

Coherent vortical motion has been reported in a wide variety of populations including living organisms (bacteria, fishes, human crowds) and synthetic active matter (shaken grains, mixtures of biopolymers), yet a unified description of the…