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The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility. It mainly focuses…
The reaction-diffusion models have been extensively applied to explain the mechanism of pattern formations in early embryogenesis based on geometrically confined microtissues consisting of human pluripotent stem cells. Recently, mechanical…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
Single and collective cell migration are fundamental processes critical for physiological phenomena ranging from embryonic development and immune response to wound healing and cancer metastasis. To understand cell migration from a physical…
Many fundamental biological processes are dependent on cellular migration. Although the mechanical mechanisms of single-cell migration are relatively well understood, those underlying migration of multiple cells adhered to each other in a…
We propose a mechanism of cell motility which is based on contraction and does not require protrusion. The contraction driven translocation of a cell is due to internal flow of the cytoskeleton generated by molecular motors. Each motor…
Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…
Chemotaxis combines three processes: directional sensing, polarity reorientation and migration. Directed migration plays an important role in immune response, metastasis, wound healing and development. To describe chemotaxis, we extend a…
The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…
Eukaryotic cells can move spontaneously without being guided by external cues. For such spontaneous movements, a variety of different modes have been observed, including the amoeboid-like locomotion with protrusion of multiple pseudopods,…
The shape that stem cells reach at the end of adhesion process influences their differentiation. Rearrangement of cytoskeleton and modification of intracellular tension may activate mechanotransduction pathways controlling cell commitment.…
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
The elastic properties of two-component bilayer membranes are studied using a coarse grain model for amphiphilic molecules. The two species of amphiphiles considered here differ only in their length. Molecular Dynamics simulations are…
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
This study develops an equation for describing three-dimensional membrane transformation through proliferation of its component cells regulated by morphogen density distributions on the membrane. The equation is developed in a…
A constitutive relation between stress and strain relative to a reference state is the basic assumption of elasticity theory. However, in living matter, force generation is governed by motor molecule activity, which does not depend on…
Lipid membranes are abundant in living organisms, where they constitute a surrounding shell for cells and their organelles. There are many circumstances in which the deformations of lipid membranes are involved in living cells: fusion and…
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…