Related papers: Shape driven confluent rigidity transition in curv…
Modeling the spontaneous evolution of morphology in natural systems and its preservation by proportionate growth remains a major scientific challenge. Yet, it is conceivable that if the basic mechanisms of growth and the coupled kinetic…
In jamming systems like colloids, emulsions, foams, and biological tissues, significant deformation is essential for processes such as material scraping or wound self-healing. To adequately spread a foam or cream over a surface, external…
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…
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…
The maintenance of tissue and organ structures during dynamic homeostasis is often not well understood. In order for a system to be stable, cell renewal, cell migration and cell death must be finely balanced. Moreover, a tissue's shape must…
Motivated to understand the behavior of biological filaments interacting with membranes of various types, we study a theoretical model for the shape and thermodynamics of intrinsically-helical filaments bound to curved membranes. We show…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
We investigate discrete spin transformations, a geometric framework to manipulate surface meshes by controlling mean curvature. Applications include surface fairing -- flowing a mesh onto say, a reference sphere -- and mesh extrusion --…
Since the lipid raft model was developed at the end of the last century, it became clear that the specific molecular arrangements of phospholipid assemblies within a membrane have profound implications in a vast range of physiological…
A central challenge in modeling neurodegenerative diseases is connecting cellular-level mechanisms to tissue-level pathology, in particular to determine whether pathology is driven primarily by cell-autonomous triggers or by propagation…
Cell shape is determined by a balance of intrinsic properties of the cell as well as its mechanochemical environment. Inhomogeneous shape changes underly many morphogenetic events and involve spatial gradients in active cellular forces…
We introduce a novel model, comprising self-avoiding surfaces and incorporating edges and tubules, that is designed to characterize the structural morphologies and transitions observed within the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). By employing…
I show the assumed Bilayer structure of cell membranes is Topologically falsified by known aminophospholipid dynamics in metabolically-active, Far from Equilibrium cells. The sensitivity of lipid and cytoplasmic flows to temperature,…
Biological tissues exhibit complex behaviors with their dynamics often resembling inert soft matter such as liquids, polymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. These analogies enable physics-based approaches for investigations of emergent…
We present a generic framework for modelling three-dimensional deformable shells of active matter that captures the orientational dynamics of the active particles and hydrodynamic interactions on the shell and with the surrounding…
We use a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network approach to learn morphological evolution driven by surface diffusion. To this aim we first produce a training set using phase field simulations. Intentionally, we insert in such a set only…
We investigate how an externally imposed curvature influences lipid segregation on two-phase-coexistent membranes. We show that the bending-modulus contrast of the two phases and the curvature act together to yield a reduced effective line…
A model of multicellular systems with several types of cells is developed from the phase field model. The model is presented as a set of partial differential equations of the field variables, each of which expresses the shape of one cell.…
Soft modulated phases have been shown to undergo complex morphological transitions, in which layer remodeling induced by mean and Gaussian curvatures plays a major role. This is the case in smectic films under thermal treatment, where focal…
Cells exhibit qualitatively different behaviors on substrates with different rigidities. The fact that cells are more polarized on the stiffer substrate motivates us to construct a two-dimensional cell with the distribution of focal…