Related papers: Local Nonlinear Elastic Response of Extracellular …
An analytical model based on variational principles for a thin-walled stiffened plate subjected to axial compression is presented. A system of nonlinear differential and integral equations is derived and solved using numerical continuation.…
Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical…
Biopolymer Networks play an important role in coordinating and regulating collective cellular dynamics via a number of signaling pathways. Here, we investigate the mechanical response of a model biopolymer network due to the active…
We introduce a strain-energy based nonlinear hyper-elastic formulation to model the material properties of ultrasoft dielectric elastomers over a wide range of elastic properties, prestretch, and thicknesses. We build on the uniaxial Gent…
Hydrogen peroxide oxidises cysteine residues to control protein function, yet bulk rate constants predict hours for changes that occur in cells in seconds. Here, this work shows that local electromagnetic fields (EMFs), ubiquitous in…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
Tumor spheroids are in vitro three-dimensional, cellular collectives consisting of cancerous cells. Embedding these spheroids in an in vitro fibrous environment, such as a collagen network, to mimic the extracellular matrix (ECM) provides…
Here, we provide an overview of theoretical approaches to semiflexible polymers and their networks. Such semiflexible polymers have large bending rigidities that can compete with the entropic tendency of a chain to crumple up into a random…
Biofilms are a cluster of bacteria embedded in extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that contain a complex composition of polysaccharides, proteins, and extracellular DNA (eDNA). Desirable mechanical properties of the biofilms are…
We explore the behavior of spatially heterogeneous elastic moduli as well as the correlations between local moduli in model solids with short-range repulsive potentials. We show through numerical simulations that local elastic moduli…
Self-positioned nanomembranes such as rolled-up tubes and wrinkled thin films have been potential systems for a variety of applications and basic studies on elastic properties of nanometer-thick systems. Although there is a clear driving…
Compression stiffening, or an increase in shear modulus with increasing compressive strain, has been observed in recent rheometry experiments on brain, liver, and fat tissues. Here, we extend the known types of biomaterials exhibiting this…
In contrast with ordinary materials, living matter drives its own motion by generating active, out-of-equilibrium internal stresses. These stresses typically originate from localized active elements embedded in an elastic medium, such as…
Exact solutions are derived for the problem of a two-dimensional, infinitely anisotropic, linear-elastic medium containing a periodic lattice of voids. The matrix material possesses either one infinitely soft, or one infinitely hard loading…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
Polymer gels behave as soft viscoelastic solids and exhibit a generic nonlinear mechanical response characterized by pronounced stiffening prior to irreversible failure, most often through macroscopic fractures. Here, we aim at capturing…
Networks of elastic beams can deform either by stretching or bending of their members. The primary mode of deformation (bending or stretching) crucially depends on the specific details of the network architecture. In order to shed light on…
Experiments have shown that elasticity of disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks is very different from networks with rigid crosslinks. Here, we model and analyze filamentous networks as a collection of randomly oriented…
Force versus extension curves measure entropic elasticity of single polymer chain in force spectroscopy experiments. A Worm-like Chain model is used to describe force extension experiments with an intrinsic chain parameter called…
We review continuum elastic models for the transmission of both external forces and internal active cellular forces in biopolymer gels, and relate them to recent experiments. Rather than being exhaustive, we focus on continuum elastic…