Related papers: Quantifying active and resistive stresses in adher…
Tensegrity structures are frameworks in a stable self-equilibrated prestress state that have been applied in various fields in science and engineering. Research into tensegrity structures has resulted in reliable techniques for their form…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…
A flexible membrane deforming its shape in time can self-propel in a viscous fluid. Alternatively, if the membrane is anchored, its deformation will lead to fluid transport. Past work in this area focused on situations where the deformation…
How cells move through the three-dimensional extracellular matrix (ECM) is of increasing interest in attempts to understand important biological processes such as cancer metastasis. Just as in motion on flat surfaces, it is expected that…
We present and analyse a model for cell signalling processes in biological tissues. The model includes diffusion and nonlinear reactions on the cell surfaces, and both inter- and intracellular signalling. Using techniques from the theory of…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
Previous work introduced a lower-dimensional numerical model for the geometric nonlinear simulation and optimization of compliant pressure actuated cellular structures. This model takes into account hinge eccentricities as well as…
We develop multipoint stress mixed finite element methods for linear elasticity with weak stress symmetry on cuboid grids, which can be reduced to a symmetric and positive definite cell-centered system. The methods employ the lowest-order…
From flocks of birds to biomolecular assemblies, systems in which many individual components independently consume energy to perform mechanical work exhibit a wide array of striking behaviors. Methods to quantify the dynamics of these so…
Amoeboid motion is a dynamic mode of cell motility essential for processes such as the immune response and wound healing. This review examines recent developments in the mathematical and computational modeling of amoeboid crawling, focusing…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…
Cell membranes are studded with protrusions that were thoroughly analyzed with electron microscopy. However, the nanometer-scale three-dimensional motions generated by cell membranes to fit the topography of foreign surfaces and initiate…
To explain the differentiation of stem cells in terms of dynamical systems theory, models of interacting cells with intracellular protein expression dynamics are analyzed and simulated. Simulations were carried out for all possible protein…
Adhesion between cells plays an important role in many biological processes such as tissue morphogenesis and homeostasis, wound healing and cancer cell metastasis. From a mathematical perspective, adhesion between multiple cell types has…
We investigate the geometrical and mechanical properties of adherent cells characterized by a highly anisotropic actin cytoskeleton. Using a combination of theoretical work and experiments on micropillar arrays, we demonstrate that the…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behavior of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this…
We introduce a mathematical model for the mechanical behaviour of the eukaryotic cell cytoskeleton. This discrete model involves a regular array of pre-stressed protein filaments that exhibit resistance to enthalpic stretching, joined at…
Describing and measuring the elastic properties of cellular materials such as honeycombs and foams can be a difficult problem when the cell structure is disordered. This paper suggests that tracking the flow of forces through the material…