Related papers: Microtubule organization and cell geometry
Microtubules are an essential physical building block of cellular systems. They are organized using specific crosslinkers, motors, and influencers of nucleation and growth. With the addition of anti-parallel crosslinkers, microtubule…
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
The exchange of diffusive metabolites is known to control the spatial patterns formed by microbial populations, as revealed by recent studies in the laboratory. However, the matrices used, such as agarose pads, lack the structured geometry…
Two-scale topology optimization, combined with the design of microstructure families with a broad range of effective material parameters, is increasingly widely used in many fabrication applications to achieve a target deformation behavior…
An explicit moving boundary method for the numerical solution of time-dependent hyperbolic conservation laws on grids produced by the intersection of complex geometries with a regular Cartesian grid is presented. As it employs directional…
Cell size control and homeostasis is a major topic in cell biology yet to be fully understood. Several growth laws like the timer, adder, and sizer were proposed, and mathematical approaches that model cell growth and division were…
Within cells, vesicles and proteins are actively transported several micrometers along the cytoskeletal filaments. The transport along microtubules is propelled by dynein and kinesin motors, which carry the cargo in opposite directions.…
Recent studies of two-dimensional poly-disperse disc systems revealed a coordinated self-organisation of cell stresses and shapes, with certain distributions collapsing onto a master form for many processes, size distributions, friction…
We focus on potential mechanisms for `energy-loss-free' transport along the cell microtubules, which could be considered as realizations of Fr\"ohlich's ideas on the role of solitons for superconductivity and/or biological matter. In…
In this work we approach cell migration under a large-scale assumption, so that the system reduces to a particle in motion. Unlike classical particle models, the cell displacement results from its internal activity: the cell velocity is a…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) respond when an animal occupies a periodic lattice of "grid fields" in the environment. The grids are organized in modules with spatial periods, or scales, clustered around discrete values…
Using a statistical-mechanics approach, we study the effects of geometry and self-avoidance on the ordering of slender filaments inside non-isotropic containers, considering cortical microtubules in plant cells, and packing of genetic…
A big challenge in current biology is to understand the exact self-organization mechanism underlying complex multi-physics coupling developmental processes. With multiscale computations of from subcellular gene expressions to cell…
Distant spreading of primary lesions is modulated by the vascular dynamics of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and their ability to establish metastatic niches. While the mechanisms regulating CTC homing in specific tissues are yet to be…
The vortex dynamics in a low temperature superconductor deposited on top of a rectangular array of micrometer size permalloy triangles is investigated experimentally. The rectangular unit cell is such that neighboring triangles physically…
We propose a non-local model for contact guidance and steric hindrance depending on a single external cue, namely the extracellular matrix, that affects in a twofold way the polarization and speed of motion of the cells. We start from a…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
Myxococcus xanthus cells self-organize into aligned groups, clusters, at various stages of their lifecycle. Formation of these clusters is crucial for the complex dynamic multi-cellular behavior of these bacteria. However, the mechanism…