Related papers: Local Nonlinear Elastic Response of Extracellular …
We theoretically study the effect of external deformation on activated structural relaxation and elementary aspects of the nonlinear mechanical response of glassy hard sphere fluids in the context of the nonequilibrium version of the…
During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
Fiber-reinforcement is a universal feature of many biological tissues. It involves the interplay between fiber stiffness, fiber orientation, and the elastic properties of the matrix, influencing pattern formation and evolution in layered…
Protrusions at the leading-edge of a cell play an important role in sensing the extracellular cues, during cellular spreading and motility. Recent studies provided indications that these protrusions wrap (coil) around the extra-cellular…
A theory and computational method are provided for the calculation of lipid membranes elastic parameters, which overcomes the difficulties of the existing approaches and can be applied not only to single-component but also to…
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…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked elastomer networks with liquid crystal mesogens incorporated into the main or side chain. Polydomain liquid crystalline (nematic) elastomers exhibit unusual mechanical properties like soft…
Cellular elastomeric metamaterials are interesting for various applications, e.g. soft robotics, as they may exhibit multiple microstructural pattern transformations, each with its characteristic mechanical behavior. Numerical literature…
Recently the materials possessing structure of molecular and supramolecular matrix are more and more actively studied. They are relative to many polymeric materials of a technological origin, such as rubber, and living biological tissues.…
We consider a class of nonconvex energy functionals that lies in the framework of the peridynamics model of continuum mechanics. The energy densities are functions of a nonlocal strain that describes deformation based on pairwise…
We provide a unified theory for the high force elasticity of biopolymers solely in terms of the persistence length, $\xi_p$, and the monomer spacing, $a$. When the force $f>\fh \sim k_BT\xi_p/a^2$ the biopolymers behave as Freely Jointed…
We present a model for unicellular algal growth as motivated by several experiments implicating the importance of calcium ions and ``loosening'' enzymes in morphogenesis. A growing cell at rest in a diffusive calcium solution is viewed as…
We study the existence of weak solutions for a model of cell invasion into the extracellular matrix (ECM), which consists of a non-linear partial differential equation for the density of cells, coupled with an ordinary differential equation…
Large-scale cellular transformations are triggered by subtle physical and structural changes in individual biomacromolecular and membrane components. A prototypical example of such an event is the orchestrated fusion of membranes within an…
Chain molecules play important roles in industry and in living cells. Our focus here is on distinct ways of modeling the stiffness inherent in a chain molecule. We consider three types of stiffnesses -- one yielding an energy penalty for…
We use an elastic model to explore faceting of solid-wall vesicles with elastic heterogeneities. We show that faceting occurs in regions where the vesicle wall is softer, such as areas of reduced wall thicknesses or concentrated in…
Cell-cell adhesion is an inherently nonlocal phenomenon. Numerous partial differential equation models with nonlocal term have been recently presented to describe this phenomenon, yet the mathematical properties of nonlocal adhesion model…
Recent progress on studies of the nanoscale mechanical responses in disordered systems has highlighted a strong degree of heterogeneity in the elastic moduli. In this contribution, using computer simulations, we study the elastic…
We present a method for computing locally varying nonlinear mechanical properties in particle simulations of amorphous solids. Plastic rearrangements outside a probed region are suppressed by introducing an external field that directly…