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Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
A contemporary procedure to grow artificial tissue is to seed cells onto a porous biomaterial scaffold and culture it within a perfusion bioreactor to facilitate the transport of nutrients to growing cells. Typical models of cell growth for…
Recent experimental work has shown that eukaryotic cells can swim in a fluid as well as crawl on a substrate. We investigate the swimming behavior of Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae who swim by initiating traveling protrusions at the front…
A motile cell, when stimulated, shows a dramatic increase in the activity of its membrane, manifested by the appearance of dynamic membrane structures such as lamellipodia, filopodia and membrane ruffles. The external stimulus turns on…
The classical macroscopic chemotaxis equations have previously been derived from an individual-based description of the tactic response of cells that use a "run-and-tumble" strategy in response to environmental cues. Here we derive…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
We study the shape dynamics of a two-component fluid membrane, using a dynamical triangulation monte carlo simulation and a Langevin description. Phase separation induces morphology changes depending on the lateral mobility of the lipids.…
Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
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…
A new class of micromechanically motivated chain network models for soft biological tissues is presented. On the microlevel, it is based on the statistics of long chain molecules. A wormlike chain model is applied to capture the behavior of…
Collective cell migration in cohesive units is vital for tissue morphogenesis, wound repair, and immune response. While the fundamental driving forces for collective cell motion stem from contractile and protrusive activities of individual…
The employment of nonlocal PDE models to describe biological aggregation and other phenomena has gained considerable traction in recent years. For cell populations, these methods grant a means of accommodating essential elements such as…
The Voronoi-based cellular model is highly successful in describing the motion of two-dimensional confluent cell tissues. In the homogeneous version of this model, the energy of each cell is determined solely by its geometric shape and…
Numerous physical models have been proposed to explain how cell motility emerges from internal activity, mostly focused on how crawling motion arises from internal processes. Here we offer a classification of self-propulsion mechanisms…
In the emerging field of 3D bioprinting, cell damage due to large deformations is considered a main cause for cell death and loss of functionality inside the printed construct. Those deformations, in turn, strongly depend on the…
The process of polarization determines the head and tail of single cells. A mechanism of this kind frequently precedes the subsequent cell locomotion and it determines the direction of motion. The process of polarization has frequently been…
Understanding how cells respond to external stimuli is a central challenge in biomedical research and drug development. Current computational frameworks for modelling cellular responses remain restricted to two-dimensional representations,…