Related papers: Local Nonlinear Elastic Response of Extracellular …

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…

Soft composite solids, comprising discrete inclusions embedded within a compliant matrix, are emerging candidates for engineering synthetic tissues and soft robotic materials. Current strategies for controlling their nonlinear mechanics,…

Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…

Previous research on semiflexible polymers including cytoskeletal networks in cells has suggested the existence of distinct regimes of elastic response, in which the strain field is either uniform (affine) or non-uniform (non-affine) under…

The local elastic properties of strongly disordered host material are investigated using the theory of correlated random matrices. A significant increase in stiffness is shown in the interfacial region, which thickness depends on the…

Cells crawling through tissues migrate inside a complex fibrous environment called the extracellular matrix (ECM), which provides signals regulating motility. Here we investigate one such well-known pathway, involving mutually antagonistic…

Networks of semiflexible or stiff polymers such as most biopolymers are known to deform inhomogeneously when sheared. The effects of such non-affine deformation have been shown to be much stronger than for flexible polymers. To date, our…

Continuum elasticity is a powerful tool applicable in a broad range of physical systems and phenomena. Yet, understanding how and on what scales material disorder may lead to the breakdown of continuum elasticity is not fully understood. We…

Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…

We have studied the elastic response of actin networks with both compliant and rigid crosslinks by modeling molecular motors as force dipoles. Our finite element simulations show that for compliant crosslinkers such as filamin A, the…

Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…

We show how strain stiffening affects the elastic response to internal forces, caused either by material defects and inhomogeneities or by active forces that molecular motors generate in living cells. For a spherical force dipole in a…

The properties of polymeric nanofibers can be tailored and enhanced by properly managing the structure of the polymeric molecules at the nanoscale. Although electrospun polymer fibers are increasingly exploited in many technological…

Analytical and numerical calculations are presented for the mechanical response of fiber networks in a state of axisymmetric prestress, in the limit where geometric non-linearities such as fiber rotation are negligible. This allows us to…

Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a highly complex structure through which biochemical and mechanical signals are transmitted. In processes of cell migration, the ECM also acts as a scaffold, providing structural support to cells as well as…

We consider a class of models for nonlinearly elastic surfaces in this work. We have in mind thin, highly deformable structures modeled directly as two-dimensional nonlinearly elastic continua, accounting for finite membrane and bending…

We investigate the stretching response of a thick polymer model by means of extensive stochastic simulations. The computational results are synthesized in an analytic expression that characterizes how the force versus elongation curve…

We first consider an elastic thin heterogeneous cylinder of radius of order epsilon: the interior of the cylinder is occupied by a stiff material (fiber) that is surrounded by a soft material (matrix). By assuming that the elasticity tensor…

Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…