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Surface tension governed by differential adhesion can drive fluid particle mixtures to sort into separate regions, i.e., demix. Does the same phenomenon occur in confluent biological tissues? We begin to answer this question for epithelial…
The cortical array is a structure consisting of highly aligned microtubules which plays a crucial role in the characteristic uniaxial expansion of all growing plant cells. Recent experiments have shown polymerization-driven collisions…
Cell cortex contraction is essential for shaping cells, enabling movement, ensuring proper division, maintaining tissue integrity, guiding development, and responding to mechanical signals - all critical for the life and health of…
The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence…
The homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
Mechanical interactions among cells in a growing microbial colony can significantly influence the colony's spatial genetic structure and, thus, evolutionary outcomes such as the fates of rare mutations. Here, we computationally investigate…
One-dimensional arrays of nucleosomes (DNA-bound histone octamers separated by stretches of linker DNA) fold into higher-order chromatin structures which ultimately make up eukaryotic chromosomes. Chromatin structure formation leads to…
The mitotic spindle lies at the heart of the spatio-temporal control over cellular components during cell division. The spindle consists of microtubules, which are not only crosslinked by motor proteins but also by passive binding proteins.…
The architecture of the eukaryotic genome is characterized by a high degree of spatial organization. Chromosomes occupy preferred territories correlated to their state of activity and, yet, displace their genes to interact with remote sites…
How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Collective cell migration plays an essential role in various biological processes, such as development or cancer proliferation. While cell-cell interactions are clearly key determinants of collective cell migration -- in addition to…
We have characterized the two-dimensional spatial dependence of the hydrodynamic interactions between two adhesively rolling leukocytes in a live venule in the mouse cremaster muscle. Two rolling leukocytes were observed to slow each other…
Spatiotemporal patterns in multicellular systems are important to understanding tissue dynamics, for instance, during embryonic development and disease. Here, we use a multiphase field model to study numerically the behavior of a…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
Many self-propelled microorganisms are attracted to surfaces. This makes their dynamics in restricted geometries very different from that observed in the bulk. Swimming along walls is beneficial for directing and sorting cells, but may be…
During interphase, a typical cell nucleus features spatial compartmentalization of transcriptionally active euchromatin and repressed heterochromatin domains. In conventional nuclear organization, euchromatin predominantly occupies the…
The viscoelastic behavior of composites consisting of spindle-shaped hematite particles in poly-N-isopropylacrylamide hydrogels is investigated both, by means of rheological oscillatory shear experiments, and the field-induced alignment of…
We analyze the role of the force-dependent kinetics of motor proteins in the stability of antiparallel arrays of polar filaments, such as those in the mitotic spindle. We determine the possible stable structures and show that there exists…