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We propose a mechanism of cell motility which is based on contraction and does not require protrusion. The contraction driven translocation of a cell is due to internal flow of the cytoskeleton generated by molecular motors. Each motor…
Cell motion inside dense tissues governs many biological processes, including embryonic development and cancer metastasis, and recent experiments suggest that these tissues exhibit collective glassy behavior. To make quantitative…
Many soft materials, including foams, dense emulsions, micro gel bead suspensions, star polymers, dense packing of surfactant onion micelles, and textured morphologies of liquid crystals, share the basic "glassy" features of structural…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Cilia are motile biological appendages that are driven to bend by internal shear stresses between tubulin filaments. A continuum model of ciliary material is constructed that incorporates the essential ciliary constraints: (1)…
The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity transition controlled by a mechanical parameter that…
We study the rheological properties of colloidal microphases in two dimensions simulating a model of colloidal particles with competing interactions. Due to the competition between short-range attraction and long-range repulsion, as a…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
Recent work on particle-based models of tissues has suggested that any finite rate of cell division and cell death is sufficient to fluidize an epithelial tissue. At the same time, experimental evidence has indicated the existence of glassy…
A phase-field model is used to capture the surfactant-driven formation of fracture patterns in particulate monolayers. The model is intended for the regime of closely-packed systems in which the mechanical response of the monolayer can be…
A long standing puzzle in the rheology of living cells is the origin of the experimentally observed long time stress relaxation. The mechanics of the cell is largely dictated by the cytoskeleton, which is a biopolymer network consisting of…
Multiphase systems are ubiquitous in engineering, biology, and materials science, where understanding their complex interactions and rheological behavior is crucial for advancing applications ranging from emulsion stability to cellular…
Cell neighbor exchanges play a critical role in regulating tissue fluidity during epithelial morphogenesis and repair. In vivo, these neighbor exchanges are often hindered by the formation of transiently stable four-fold vertices, which can…
Collective cell flows are a hallmark of tissue dynamics in development, wound healing, and various diseases. Here, we perform experiments on epithelial MDCK cell monolayers, over tens of hours without jamming, on millimeter-scale…
We consider the yielding behavior of amorphous solids under cyclic shear deformation and show that it can be mapped into a random walk in a confining potential with an absorbing boundary. The resulting dynamics is governed by the first…
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…
Tissue surface tension influences cell sorting and tissue fusion. Earlier mechanical studies suggest that multicellular spheroids actively reinforce their surface tension with applied force. Here we study this open question through…
Epithelial cell monolayers expand on substrates by forming finger-like protrusions, created by leader cells, in the monolayer boundary. Information transmission and communication between individual entities in the cohesive collective lead…