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The mechanisms by which organs acquire their functional structure and realize its maintenance (or homeostasis) over time are still largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate this question on adipose tissue. Adipose tissue can represent…
Shape is one of the important characteristics for the structures observed in living organisms. Whereas biologists have proposed models where the shape is controlled on a molecular level [1], physicists, following Turing [2] and d'Arcy…
Natural slender structures, such as plant leaves, petals, and tendrils, often exhibit complex three-dimensional (3D) morphologies-including twisting, helical coiling, and saddle-bending-driven by differential growth. The resulting internal…
Coordinated cellular movements are key processes in tissue morphogenesis. Using a cell-based modeling approach we study the dynamics of epithelial layers lining surfaces with constant and varying curvature. We demonstrate that extrinsic…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Spatial distributions of morphogens provide positional information in developing systems, but how the distributions are established and maintained remains an open problem. Transport by diffusion has been the traditional mechanism, but…
Deformations of cell sheets during morphogenesis are driven by developmental processes such as cell division and cell shape changes. In morphoelastic shell theories of development, these processes appear as variations of the intrinsic…
Water flow in plant tissues takes place in two different physical domains separated by semipermeable membranes: cell insides and cell walls. The assembly of all cell insides and cell walls are termed symplast and apoplast, respectively.…
We propose a three dimensional mechanical model of embryonic tissue dynamics. Mechanically coupled adherent cells are represented as particles interconnected with elastic beams which can exert non-central forces and torques. Tissue…
We study colonies of non-motile, rod-shaped bacteria growing on solid substrates. In our model, bacteria interact purely mechanically, by pushing each other away as they grow, and consume a diffusing nutrient. We show that mechanical…
The simulated self-assembly of molecular building blocks into functional complexes is a key area of study in computational biology and materials science. Self-assembly simulations of proteins using physically-motivated potentials for…
Compressing a porous, fluid-filled material will drive the interstitial fluid out of the pore space, as when squeezing water out of a kitchen sponge. Inversely, injecting fluid into a porous material can deform the solid structure, as when…
We consider a partial differential equation model for the growth of heterogeneous cell populations subdivided into multiple distinct discrete phenotypes. In this model, cells preferentially move towards regions where they feel less…
The growth of a tissue, which depends on cell-cell interactions and biologically relevant process such as cell division and apoptosis, is regulated by a mechanical feedback mechanism. We account for these effects in a minimal…
A mesoscopic coarse-grain model for computationally-efficient simulations of biomembranes is presented. It combines molecular dynamics simulations for the lipids, modeled as elastic chains of beads, with multiparticle collision dynamics for…
Soft spheres interacting via a hard core and range of attractive and repulsive "soft-shoulder" potentials self-assemble into clusters forming a variety of mesophases. We combine a mean field theory developed from a lattice model with a…
A poromechanical model of partially saturated deformable porous media is proposed based on a phase field approach at modeling the behavior of the mixture of liquid water and wet air, which saturates the pore space, the phase field being the…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
Although tissues are usually studied in isolation, this situation rarely occurs in biology, as cells, tissues, and organs, coexist and interact across scales to determine both shape and function. Here, we take a quantitative approach…
The technique presented here identifies tethered mould designs, optimised for growing cultured tissue with very highly-aligned cells. It is based on a microscopic biophysical model for polarised cellular hydrogels. There is an unmet need…