Related papers: Alignment interactions drive structural transition…
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…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
The rheology of biological tissue plays an important role in many processes, from organ formation to cancer invasion. Here, we use a multi-phase field model of motile cells to simulate active microrheology within a tissue monolayer. When…
Cell spreading requires a major reorganisation of the actin cytoskeleton, from a cortical structure to a lamellipodium where filaments are mostly parallel to the substrate. We propose a model inspired by the physics of nematic liquid…
The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence…
A simple phenomenological model for describing the conformational dynamics of biological macromolecules via the nonlinearity-induced instabilities is proposed. It is shown that the interaction between charges and bending degrees of freedom…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
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…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
Cell monolayers and epithelial tissues display slow dynamics during the liquid-glass transitions, a phenomenon with direct relevance to embryogenesis, tumor metastases, and wound healing. In active cells, persistent motion and cell…
The alignment of fibers and cells in living tissues affect their mechanical properties and functionality. In this context, one can draw an analogy between tissues and nematic liquid crystal elastomers. We explore this analogy by growing…
We investigate the mechanical interplay between the spatial organization of the actin cytoskeleton and the shape of animal cells adhering on micropillar arrays. Using a combination of analytical work, computer simulations and in vitro…
Experiments and theory have shown that cell monolayers and epithelial tissues exhibit solid-liquid and glass-liquid transitions. These transitions are biologically relevant to our understanding of embryonic development, wound healing, and…
Coherent angular rotation of epithelial cells is thought to contribute to many vital physiological processes including tissue morphogenesis and glandular formation. However, factors regulating this motion, and the implications of this…
Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing fraction is effectively fixed, the prevailing paradigm…
The mechanical properties of cells, which influence the properties of the tissue they belong to, are controlled by various mechanisms. Bi et al. theoretically demonstrated that density-independent rigidity transition occurs in…
Feedback alignment and related weight-transport-free algorithms are often proposed as biologically plausible alternatives to backpropagation, yet they are typically formulated in discrete phases with implicitly synchronized forward and…
We combine numerical and analytical methods to study two dimensional active crystals formed by permanently linked swimmers and with two distinct alignment interactions. The system admits a stationary phase with quasi long range…
Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…
It is increasingly being realized that liquid-crystalline features can play an important role in the properties and dynamics of cell monolayers. Here, we present a cell-based model of cell layers, based on the phase-field formulation, that…