Related papers: Self-propelled deformable particle model for kerat…
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…
Cellular uptake through the lipid membranes plays an important role in adsorbing nutrients and fighting infection and can be used for drug delivery and nanomedicine developments. Endocytosis is one of the known pathways of the cellular…
The feedback between mechanical and chemical signals plays a key role in controlling many biological processes and collective cell behavior. Here we focus on the emergence of spatiotemporal density waves in a one-dimensional "cell train."…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Cells exert traction forces on compliant substrates and can induce surface instabilities that appear as characteristic wrinkling patterns. Here, we develop a mechanical description of cell-induced wrinkling on soft substrates using a thin…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
We study synchronization of two cardiomyocytes mediated by elastic interactions through the substrate. Modeling each cell as an oscillating force dipole governed by a Rayleigh-type equation, we derive an effective mechanical coupling from…
Eukaryotic cell motility is crucial during development, wound healing, the immune response, and cancer metastasis. Some eukaryotic cells can swim, but cells more commonly adhere to and crawl along the extracellular matrix. We study the…
Motility initiation in crawling cells requires transformation of a symmetric state into a polarized state. In contrast, motility arrest is associated with re-symmetrization of the internal configuration of a cell. Experiments on keratocytes…
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 in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
Diverse organisms exploit the geomagnetic field (GMF) for migration. Migrating birds employ an intrinsically quantum mechanical mechanism for detecting the geomagnetic field: absorption of a blue photon generates a radical pair whose two…
Near a solid boundary, E. coli swims in clockwise circular motion. We provide a hydrodynamic model for this behavior. We show that circular trajectories are natural consequences of force-free and torque-free swimming, and the hydrodynamic…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
Motivated by the formation of ring-like filament structures in the cortex of plant and animal cells, we study the dynamics of a two-dimensional layer of cytoskeletal filaments and motor proteins near a surface by a general continuum theory.…
Convergent extension of epithelial tissue is a key motif of animal morphogenesis. On a coarse scale, cell motion resembles laminar fluid flow; yet in contrast to a fluid, epithelial cells adhere to each other and maintain the tissue layer…
Cell assemblies manipulation by optogenetics is pivotal to advance neuroscience and neuroengineering. In in vivo applications, photostimulation often broadly addresses a population of cells simultaneously, leading to feed-forward and to…
Bacterial chemotaxis in Escherichia coli is a canonical system for the study of signal transduction. A remarkable feature of this system is the coexistence of precise adaptation in population with large fluctuating cellular behavior in…
Some euglenids, a family of aquatic unicellular organisms, can develop highly concerted, large-amplitude peristaltic body deformations. This remarkable behaviour has been known for centuries. Yet, its function remains controversial, and is…
Flagellated bacteria exploiting helical propulsion are known to swim along circular trajectories near surfaces. Fluid dynamics predicts this circular motion to be clockwise (CW) above a rigid surface (when viewed from inside the fluid) and…