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The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
Biological genotypes do not code directly for phenotypes; developmental physiology is the control layer that separates genomes from capacities ascertained by selection. A key aspect is competency, as cells are not a passive material but…
A fundamental task in developmental biology is to identify the mechanisms which drive morphogenesis. In many cases, pattern formation is driven by the positional information determined by both the gradient of maternal factors and hard-wired…
Adaptive structures are of interest for their ability to dynamically modify mechanical properties post fabrication, enabling structural performance that is responsive to environmental uncertainty and changing loading conditions. Dynamic…
Here we develop an approach to bio-structural robustness integrated with structure-function relationship in a unified conceptual and methodological framework, and envision its study using adequate computational and experimental methods. To…
We investigate the construction of generative models capable of encoding physical constraints that can be hard to express explicitly. For the problem of inverse material design, where one seeks to design a material with a prescribed set of…
Living organisms, ecosystems, and social systems are examples of complex systems in which robustness against inclusion of new elements is an essential feature. A recently proposed simple model has revealed a general mechanism by which such…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
The structural complexity of metamaterials is limitless, although in practice, most designs comprise periodic architectures which lead to materials with spatially homogeneous features. More advanced tasks, arising in e.g. soft robotics,…
The design of structural & functional materials for specialized applications is being fueled by rapid advancements in materials synthesis, characterization, manufacturing, with sophisticated computational materials modeling frameworks that…
Spinodal metamaterials, with architectures inspired by natural phase-separation processes, have presented a significant alternative to periodic and symmetric morphologies when designing mechanical metamaterials with extreme performance.…
The microscopic structure of several amorphous substances often reveals complex patterns such as medium- or long-range order, spatial heterogeneity, and even local polycrystallinity. To capture all these features, models usually incorporate…
We review the recent progress in computational approaches to protein design which builds on advances in statistical-mechanical protein folding theory. In particular, we evaluate the degeneracy of the protein code (i.e. how many sequences…
A fascinating and open question challenging biochemistry, physics and even geometry is the presence of highly regular motifs such as alpha-helices in the folded state of biopolymers and proteins. Stimulating explanations ranging from…
We address the folding induced by differential growth in soft layered solids via an elementary model that consists of a soft growing neo-Hookean elastic layer adhered to a deep elastic substrate. As the layer/substrate modulus ratio is…
We develop a reduced model for hard-magnetic, thin, linear-elastic shells that can be actuated through an external magnetic field, with geometrically exact strain measures. Assuming a reduced kinematics based on the Kirchhoff-Love…
Computational protein design facilitates discovery of novel proteins with prescribed structure and functionality. Exciting designs were recently reported using novel data-driven methodologies that can be roughly divided into two categories:…
Topologically interlocked materials and structures, which are assemblies of unbonded interlocking building blocks, are promising concepts for versatile structural applications. They have been shown to exhibit exceptional mechanical…
Computational models have become an essential part of exploratory protocols in cell biology, as a complement to in vivo or in vitro experiments. These virtual models have the twofold advantage of enabling access to new types of data and…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…