Related papers: Interplay between substrate rigidity and tissue fl…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
We present a hydrodynamic model of spreading epithelial monolayers as polar viscous fluids, with active contractility and traction on the substrate. The combination of both active forces generate an instability that leads to nonlinear…
The motion of cells in tissues is an ubiquitous phenomenon. In particular, in monolayered cell colonies in vitro, pronounced collective behavior with swirl-like motion has been observed deep within a cell colony, while at the same time, the…
In cell extrusion, a cell embedded in an epithelial monolayer loses its apical or basal surface and is subsequently squeezed out of the monolayer by neighboring cells. Cell extrusions occur during apoptosis, epithelial-mesenchymal…
Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…
Single and collective cell migration are fundamental processes critical for physiological phenomena ranging from embryonic development and immune response to wound healing and cancer metastasis. To understand cell migration from a physical…
We study the influence of cell-level mechanical heterogeneity in epithelial tissues using a vertex-based model. Heterogeneity in single cell stiffness is introduced as a quenched random variable in the preferred shape index($p_0$) for each…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not completely understood. We consider simplified models for…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
The rheology of biological tissue plays an important role in many processes, from organ formation to cancer invasion. Here, we use a multi-phase field model of motile cells to simulate active microrheology within a tissue monolayer. When…
The relationship between velocities, tractions, and intercellular stresses in the migrating epithelial monolayer are currently unknown. Ten years ago, a method known as Monolayer Stress Microscopy (MSM) was suggested from which the…
There is compelling evidence that substrate stiffness affects cell adhesion as well as cytoskeleton organization and contractile activity. This work was designed to study the cytoskeletal contractile activity of cells plated on microposts…
The collective migration of epithelial groups of cells plays a central role in processes such as embryo development, wound healing, and cancer invasion. While finite cell clusters are known to collectively migrate in response to external…
Crawling cell motility is vital to many biological processes such as wound healing and the immune response. Using a minimal model we investigate the effects of patterned substrate adhesiveness and biophysical cell parameters on the…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…
Coherent angular rotation of epithelial cells is thought to contribute to many vital physiological processes including tissue morphogenesis and glandular formation. However, factors regulating this motion, and the implications of this…