Related papers: Geometrical control of interface patterning underl…
Motivated by studies suggesting that the patterns exhibited by the collectively expanding fronts of thin cells during the closing of a wound [Mark et al., Biophys. J., 98:361-370, 2010] and the shapes of single cells crawling on surfaces…
Motivated by recent experiments of motile bacteria crossing liquid-liquid interfaces of isotropic- nematic coexistence (Cheon et al., Soft Matter 20: 7313-7320, 2024), we study the dynamics of prolate microswimmers traversing clean…
During colony growth, complex interactions regulate the bacterial orientation, leading to the formation of large-scale ordered structures, including topological defects and microdomains. These structures may benefit bacterial strains,…
Nonequilibrium dynamics of biomembranes with active inclusions is considered. The inclusions represent protein molecules which perform cyclic internal conformational motions driven by the energy brought with ATP ligands. As protein…
Eukaryote cells have a flexible shape, which dynamically changes according to the function performed by the cell. One mechanism for deforming the cell membrane into the desired shape is through the expression of curved membrane proteins.…
Activity can organize matter in unique configurations inaccessible to equilibrium systems, including a sundry of spiraling shapes seen in nature that range from galaxies to living tissues to fossilized stromatolites. How these dynamic yet…
Fracture networks are ubiquitous in nature, spanning scales from millimeter-sized cracks in botanical peels to hundred-kilometer-long lineae on planetary satellites. The propagation of a crack is a complex, nonlinear phenomenon governed by…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
We explore air invasion in an initially water-filled dead-end compliant microchannel containing a constriction. The phenomenon is driven by the pervaporation of the liquid present in the channel through the surrounding medium. The…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
Bacteria commonly inhabit porous environments such as host tissues, soil, and marine sediments, where complex geometries constrain and redirect their motion. Although bacterial motility has been studied in porous media, the roles of cell…
Cellular populations such as avascular tumors and microbial biofilms may "invade" or grow into surrounding populations. The invading population is often comprised of a heterogeneous mixture of cells with varying growth rates. The population…
The boundary conditions at the deformable interface between two contacting fluids are derived for the general case of the large-amplitude perturbations. The interface is modeled as perturbed free boundary that evolves in time, and the…
In biological systems, molecular-scale forces and motions are pivotal for enabling processes like motility, shape change, and replication. These forces and motions are organized, amplified, and transmitted across macroscopic scales by…
The emergent dynamics in phase-separated mixtures of isometric active and passive Brownian particles is studied numerically in two dimensions. A novel steady-state of well-defined traveling fronts is observed, where the interface between…
When the motion of a motile cell is observed closely, it appears erratic, and yet the combination of nonequilibrium forces and surfaces can produce striking examples of organization in microbial systems. While most of our current…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
The motion of interfaces is an essential feature of microstructure evolution in crystalline materials. While atomic-scale descriptions provide mechanistic clarity, continuum descriptions are important for understanding microstructural…
Membrane bending is an extensively studied problem from both modeling and experimental perspectives because of the wide implications of curvature generation in cell biology. Many of the curvature generating aspects in membranes can be…