Related papers: Tissue fluidization by cell-shape-controlled activ…

Organogenesis involves large deformations and complex shape changes that require elaborate mechanical regulation. Models of tissue biomechanics have been introduced to account for the coupling between mechanical response and biochemical…

We develop a continuum theory to describe the collective dynamics of deformable epithelial cells, using two tensor order parameters to distinguish the force-generating active filaments in the cells from their shape. The theory demonstrates…

Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…

Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…

Many interesting shapes appearing in the biological world are formed by the onset of mechanical instability. In this work we consider how the build-up of residual stress can cause a solid to buckle. In all past studies a fictitious…

Multicellular tissues are the building blocks of many biological systems and organs. These tissues are not static, but dynamically change over time. Even if the overall structure remains the same there is a turnover of cells within the…

Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…

The topology and form finding of tensegrity structures have been studied extensively since the introduction of the tensegrity concept. However, most of these studies address topology and form separately, where the former represented a…

Cell spreading and motility on an adhesive substrate are driven by the active physical forces generated by the actin cytoskeleton. We have recently shown that coupling curved membrane complexes to protrusive forces, exerted by the actin…

Spatiotemporal patterns in multicellular systems are important to understanding tissue dynamics, for instance, during embryonic development and disease. Here, we use a multiphase field model to study numerically the behavior of a…

Two-dimensional (2D) mechanical models of confluent tissues have related the mechanical state of a monolayer of cells to the average perimeter length of the cell cross sections, predicting floppiness or rigidity of the material. For the…

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…

In dense biological tissues, cell types performing different roles remain segregated by maintaining sharp interfaces. To better understand the mechanisms for such sharp compartmentalization, we study the effect of an imposed heterotypic…

Multicellular rosettes are observed in different situations such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer progression. While some molecular insights have been gained to explain the presence of these assemblies of five or more cells…

When considering flows in biological membranes, they are usually treated as flat, though more often than not, they are curved surfaces, even extremely curved, as in the case of the endoplasmic reticulum. Here, we study the topological…

Experimental evidence shows that there is a feedback between cell shape and cell motion. How this feedback impacts the collective behavior of dense cell monolayers remains an open question. We investigate the effect of a feedback that tends…

The growth of several biological tissues is known to be controlled in part by local geometrical features, such as the curvature of the tissue interface. This control leads to changes in tissue shape that in turn can affect the tissue's…

In pulsating active matter, topological defects are motile despite the absence of any macroscopic flows and microscopic self-propulsion. We reveal that this motility arises from a ratchet effect: the mechanochemical coupling between local…

Recently, Rozovsky et al. reported on the morphology and dynamics of superstructures in three-component lipid bilayers containing saturated and unsaturated lipids as well as cholesterol [J. Am. Chem. Soc. 127, 36 (2005)]. We comment that…

Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…