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The interaction of the actin cytoskeleton with cell-substrate adhesions is necessary for cell migration. While the trajectories of motile cells have a stochastic character, investigations of cell motility mechanisms rarely elaborate on the…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
Cells are complex structures which require considerable amounts of organization via transport of large intracellular cargo. While passive diffusion is often sufficiently fast for the transport of smaller cargo, active transport is necessary…
A classical problem describing the collective motion of cells, is the movement driven by consumption/depletion of a nutrient. Here we analyze one of the simplest such model written as a coupled Partial Differential Equation/Ordinary…
Actively propelled particles undergoing dissipative collisions are known to develop a state of spatially distributed coherently moving clusters. For densities larger than a characteristic value clusters grow in time and form a stationary…
Dynamic patterning of specific proteins is essential for the spatiotemporal regulation of many important intracellular processes in procaryotes, eucaryotes, and multicellular organisms. The emergence of patterns generated by interactions of…
Cell migration in confining physiological environments relies on the concerted dynamics of several cellular components, including protrusions, adhesions with the environment, and the cell nucleus. However, it remains poorly understood how…
Stochasticity is a defining feature of the pairwise forces governing interactions in biological systems-from molecular motors to cell-cell adhesion-yet its consequences on large-scale dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we show that…
We characterize cell motion in experiments and show that the transition to collective motion in colonies of gliding bacterial cells confined to a monolayer appears through the organization of cells into larger moving clusters. Collective…
Most models designed to study the bidirectional movement of cargos as they are driven by molecular motors rely on the idea that motors of different polarities can be coordinated by external agents if arranged into a motor-cargo complex to…
Traditionally, the primary mode for locomotion of amoeboid cells was thought to be crawling on a substrate. Recently, it has been experimentally shown that \textit{Dictostelium} amoeba and neutrophils can also swim in a directed fashion.…
Gradient-driven diffusion in crowded, multicomponent mixtures is a topic of high interest because of its role in biological processes such as transport in cell membranes. In partially phase-separated solutions, gradient-driven diffusion…
The migration behavior of colliding cells is critically determined by transient contact-interactions. During these interactions, the motility machinery, including the front-rear polarization of the cell, dynamically responds to surface…
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.…
We investigate the dynamics of a colony of crawling, proliferating cells with a minimal, mechanical cell model. The cells consist of two disks, modelling the cell body and a pseudopod, connected by a finite extensible spring. The cells…
Pattern formation and the mechanics of a mixture of actin filaments and myosin motors that is confined by a rigid membrane is investigated. By using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics model, we demonstrate that the competition between the…
The directed migration of cells toward stiffer substrate regions or durotaxis is relevant to tissue development and tumor progression. Here, we introduce a phenomenological model for single cell durotaxis that incorporates both elastic…
Cell migration is a fundamental process involved in physiological phenomena such as the immune response and morphogenesis, but also in pathological processes, such as the development of tumor metastasis. These functions are effectively…
The dispersal of cells from an initially constrained location is a crucial aspect of many physiological phenomena ranging from morphogenesis to tumour spreading. In such processes, the way cell-cell interactions impact the motion of single…
Colonies of the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus go through a morphological transition from a thin colony of cells to three-dimensional droplet-like fruiting bodies as a strategy to survive starvation. The biological pathways that…