Related papers: Active forces in confluent cell monolayers
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
Cells not only can be motile by crawling but are also capable of non-motility active motions like periodic contraction or pulsation. In this work, based on a Voronoi cell model, we show how this non-motility activity affects the structure,…
Biologically inspired pressure actuated cellular structures can alter their shape through pressure variations. Previous work introduced a computational framework for pressure actuated cellular structures which was limited to two cell rows…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…
In many adult tissues, stem cells and differentiated cells are not homogeneously distributed : stem cells are arranged in periodic "niches", and differentiated cells are constantly produced and migrate out of these niches. In this article,…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
We investigate a continuum mechanical model for an adherent cell on two dimensional adhesive micropatterned substrates. The cell is modeled as an isotropic and homogeneous elastic material subject to uniform internal contractile stresses.…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
We study a continuum model of an extensile active nematic to show that mesoscale turbulence develops in two stages: (i) ordered regions undergo an intrinsic hydrodynamic instability generating walls, lines of stong bend deformations, (ii)…
Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…
We present a general dynamical theory of a membrane coupled to an actin cortex containing polymerizing filaments with active stresses and currents, and demonstrate that active membrane dynamics [Phys. Rev. Lett \textbf{84}, 3494 (2000)] and…
Activity-mediated unjamming of a confluent glassy system is crucial for several biological processes, such as embryogenesis and cancer metastasis. During these processes, the cells progressively change their junction properties,…
We use a three-dimensional formulation of the cell vertex model to describe the mechanical properties of a confluent planar monolayer of prismatic cells. Treating cell height as a degree of freedom, we reduce the model to a two-dimensional…
We numerically investigate how spatial variations of extensile or contractile active stress affect bulk active nematic systems in two and three dimensions. In the absence of defects, activity gradients drive flows which re-orient the…
The mechanics of crawling cells on a substrate is investigated by using a minimal model that satisfies the force-free condition. A cell is described by two subcellular elements connected by a linear actuator that changes the length of the…
We use numerical simulations and linear stability analysis to study an active nematic layer where the director is allowed to point out of the plane. Our results highlight the difference between extensile and contractile systems. Contractile…
We present a minimal continuum model of strongly adhering cells as active contractile isotropic media and use the model to study the effect of the geometry of the adhesion patch in controlling the spatial distribution of traction and…
The dynamics of active matter driven by interacting molecular motors has a non-potential structure at the local scale. However, we show that there exists a quasi-potential effectively describing the collective self-organization of the…
The vertex model is a popular framework for modelling tightly packed biological cells, such as confluent epithelia. Cells are described by convex polygons tiling the plane and their equilibrium is found by minimizing a global mechanical…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…