Related papers: Bridging microscopic cell dynamics to nematohydrod…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing fraction is effectively fixed, the prevailing paradigm…
Liquid crystals establish a nearly unique combination of thermodynamic, hydrodynamic, and topological behavior. This poses a challenge to their theoretical understanding and modeling. The arena where these effects come together is the…
We extend the continuum theories of active nematohydrodynamics to model a two-fluid mixture with separate velocity fields for each fluid component, coupled through a viscous drag. The model is used to study an active nematic fluid, mixed…
Multiphase field models have emerged as an important computational tool for understanding biological tissue while resolving single-cell properties. While they have successfully reproduced many experimentally observed behaviors of living…
Heterogeneities in the cell membrane due to coexisting lipid phases have been conjectured to play a major functional role in cell signaling and membrane trafficking. Thereby the material properties of multiphase systems, such as the line…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…
Crystallization of supersaturated liquids usually starts by heterogeneous nucleation. Mounting evidence shows that even homogeneous nucleation in simple liquids takes place in two steps; first a dense amorphous precursor forms, and the…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
Cells are fundamental building blocks of living organisms displaying an array of shapes, morphologies, and textures that encode specific functions and physical behaviors. Elucidating the rules of this code remains a challenge. In this work,…
Biological cells utilize membranes and liquid-like droplets, known as biomolecular condensates, to structure their interior. The interaction of droplets and membranes, despite being involved in several key biological processes, is so far…
The study of spindle-like cells as nematic liquid crystals has led to remarkable insights in the understanding of tissue organization and morphogenesis. In the characterization of this anomalous liquid crystal material, we focus on the…
As motivated by studies of cellular motility driven by spatiotemporal chemotactic gradients in microdevices, we develop a framework for constructing approximate analytical solutions for the location, speed and cellular densities for cell…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
We introduce the notion of cell division-induced activity and show that the cell division generates extensile forces and drives dynamical patterns in cell assemblies. Extending the hydrodynamic models of lyotropic active nematics we…
The development of complex multicellular organisms from a single parent cell is a highly orchestrated process that cells conduct collectively without central guidance, creating intricate dynamic patterns essential for development and…
Recent advances recognize that the viscoelastic properties of epithelial structures play important roles in biology and disease modeling. However, accessing the viscoelastic properties of multicellular structures in mechanistic or…
The motion of the three-phase contact line between two immiscible fluids and a solid surface arises in a variety of wetting phenomena and technological applications. One challenge in continuum theory is the effective representation of…
Cell growth, division and death are defining features of biological tissues that contribute to morphogenesis. In hydrodynamic descriptions of cohesive tissues, their occurrence implies a non-zero rate of variation of cell density. We show…