Related papers: Blastocoel morphogenesis: a biophysics perspective
The electrophysiology of betacells is at the origin of insulin secretion. Betacells exhibit a complex behaviour upon stimulation with glucose including repeated and uninterrupted bursting. Mathematical modelling is most suitable to improve…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
A distinguishing feature of a multicellular living system is that it operates at various scales, from the intracellular to organismal. Very little is known at present on how tissue level properties are related to cell and subcellular…
During development of biological organisms, multiple complex structures are formed. In many instances, these structures need to exhibit a high degree of order to be functional, although many of their constituents are intrinsically…
Convergent extension of epithelial tissue is a key motif of animal morphogenesis. On a coarse scale, cell motion resembles laminar fluid flow; yet in contrast to a fluid, epithelial cells adhere to each other and maintain the tissue layer…
Morphoelasticity represents a foundational theory for tracing back growth, remodelling, and morphogenesis, yet crucial challenges persist. A unified growth law -- independent of a priori assumptions about constitutive relations or specified…
Microelectronic morphogenesis is the creation and maintenance of complex functional structures by microelectronic information within shape-changing materials. Only recently has in-built information technology begun to be used to reshape…
Recently, much attention has been given to a noteworthy property of some soft tissues: their ability to grow. Many attempts have been made to model this behaviour in biology, chemistry and physics. Using the theory of finite elasticity,…
Biological genotypes do not code directly for phenotypes; developmental physiology is the control layer that separates genomes from capacities ascertained by selection. A key aspect is competency, as cells are not a passive material but…
Multicellular rosettes are observed in different situations such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer progression. While some molecular insights have been gained to explain the presence of these assemblies of five or more cells…
Leptogenesis is a class of scenarios where the baryon asymmetry of the Universe is produced from a lepton asymmetry generated in the decays of a heavy sterile neutrino. We explain the motivation for leptogenesis. We review the basic…
A system of a metastable phase with several sorts of the heterogeneous centers is considered. An analytical theory for the process of decay in such a system has been constructed. The free energy of formation of the critical embryo is…
The mechanical behaviour of solid biological tissues has long been described using models based on classical continuum mechanics. However, the classical continuum theories of elasticity and viscoelasticity cannot easily capture the…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
Coordinated cellular movements are key processes in tissue morphogenesis. Using a cell-based modeling approach we study the dynamics of epithelial layers lining surfaces with constant and varying curvature. We demonstrate that extrinsic…
Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
Metabolic substrates, such as oxygen and glucose, are rapidly delivered to the cell through filtration across microvessels walls. Modelling this important process is complicated by the coupling between flow and transport equations, which…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
We investigate possible shapes of the electric field, which oscillating dipoles in a certain region of biological tissue can produce in a neighboring region, or outside the tissue boundaries. We find that a wide range of shapes, including…