Related papers: Alignment interactions drive structural transition…
Self-alignment describes the property of a polar active unit to align or anti-align its orientation towards its velocity. In contrast to mutual alignment, where the headings of multiple active units tend to directly align to each other --…
Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions such as proliferation, motility, and cell death, and such cellular systems are…
Surface tension governed by differential adhesion can drive fluid particle mixtures to sort into separate regions, i.e., demix. Does the same phenomenon occur in confluent biological tissues? We begin to answer this question for epithelial…
The collective behaviour of confluent cell sheets is strongly influenced both by polar forces, arising through cytoskeletal propulsion and by active inter-cellular forces, which are mediated by interactions across cell-cell junctions. We…
Nematic solids respond strongly to changes in ambient heat or light, significantly differently parallel and perpendicular to the director. This phenomenon is well characterized for uniform director fields, but not for defect textures. We…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
In vivo, eukaryotic cells are embedded in a matrix environment, where they grow and develop. Generally, this extracellular matrix (ECM) is an anisotropic fibrous structure, through which macromolecules and biochemical signaling molecules at…
Recent advances in high-resolution experimental methods have highlighted the significance of cell signal pathway crosstalk and localised signalling activity in the development and disease of numerous biological systems. The investigation of…
The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic…
Two-dimensional (2D) mechanical models of confluent tissues have related the mechanical state of a monolayer of cells to the average perimeter length of the cell cross sections, predicting floppiness or rigidity of the material. For the…
Active processes in living systems generate nonequilibrium forces that deform embedded passive macromolecules. To understand how such dynamics influence polymer conformation, we study a flexible passive chain in an active nematic fluid.…
During cell migration, cells become polarized, change their shape, and move in response to various internal and external cues. Cell polarization is defined through the spatio-temporal organization of molecules such as PI3K or small GTPases,…
The mechanical behaviour and symmetry-breaking shape deformation of red blood cells subjected to shear flows is used to demonstrate that far from being random fluids, both the membrane and cytoplasm of every biological cell undergo…
We conjecture that for a wide class of interacting particle systems evolving in discrete time, namely conservative cellular automata with piecewise linear flow diagram, relaxation to the limit set follows the same power law at critical…
By means of classical density functional theory and its dynamical extension, we consider a colloidal fluid with spherically-symmetric competing interactions, which are well known to exhibit a rich bulk phase behavior. This includes complex…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
In tissues, cells in direct physical contact with each other can exchange ions or molecules via protein clusters called gap junctions that form channels across the membranes of adjacent cells. Here, we use a simplified biomimetic approach,…
Using the Lebwohl-Lasher interaction for reciprocal local alignment, we present a comprehensive phase diagram for a dry, apolar, active nematic system using its stochastic \new{off-lattice} dynamics. \new{The nematic-isotropic transition in…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…