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Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have crucial roles in the spread of tumors during metastasis. A decisive step is the extravasation of CTCs from the blood stream or lymph system, which depends on the ability of cells to attach to vessel…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Motile cilia are slender, hair-like cellular appendages that spontaneously oscillate under the action of internal molecular motors and are typically found in dense arrays. These active filaments coordinate their beating to generate…
Bacterial colonies growing on surfaces are shaped by mechanical stresses transmitted through the community, governed by the balance between cell growth and steric and cell-substrate interactions. Using overdamped dynamics simulations of…
Intact-organism imaging of Drosophila larvae reveals and quantifies chromatin-aqueous phase separation. The chromatin can be organized near the lamina layer of the nuclear envelope, conventionally fill the nucleus, be organized centrally,…
Chromatin looping is a major epigenetic regulatory mechanism in higher eukaryotes. Besides its role in transcriptional regulation, chromatin loops have been proposed to play a pivotal role in the segregation of entire chromosomes. The…
Mixtures of microtubules and molecular motors form active materials with diverse dynamical behaviors that vary based on their constituents' molecular properties. We map the non-equilibrium phase diagram of microtubules and tip-accumulating…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
Colloids self-assemble into various organized superstructures determined by particle interactions. There is a tremendous progress in both the scientific understanding and applications of self-assemblies of single-type identical particles.…
A number of factors, such as, cell-cell interactions and self-propulsion of cells driven by cytoskeletal forces determine tissue morphologies and dynamics. To explore the interplay between these factors in controlling the dynamics at the…
We report the simultaneous characterization of time- and force-dependent mechanical properties of adherent cells in the physiologically relevant regime of large forces. We used magnetic tweezers to apply forces to magnetic beads bound to…
Systems with long-range interactions when quenced into a metastable state near the pseudo-spinodal exhibit nucleation processes that are quite different from the classical nucleation seen near the coexistence curve. In systems with…
In the cellular phenomena of cytoplasmic streaming, molecular motors carrying cargo along a network of microtubules entrain the surrounding fluid. The piconewton forces produced by individual motors are sufficient to deform long…
The phase behavior of colloid-polymer mixtures, and of solutions of globular proteins, is often interpreted in terms of a simple model of hard spheres with short-ranged attraction. While such a model yields a qualitative understanding of…
Recent studies of chondrites have found a tungsten isotopic anomaly between chondrules and matrix. Given the refractory nature of tungsten, this implies that W was carried into the solar nebula by at least two distinct families of pre-solar…
The stability of organic solar cells is strongly affected by the morphology of the photoactive layers, whose separated crystalline and/or amorphous phases are kinetically quenched far from their thermodynamic equilibrium during the…
Membrane tubes (spicules) arise in cells, or artificial membranes, in the nonlinear deformation regime due to, e.g. the growth of microtubules, actin filaments or sickle hemoglobin fibers towards a membrane. We calculate the axial force…
Cell migration is closely linked to cell shape, yet cell size is often assumed to remain constant. This assumption is challenged by recent experiments showing that cells undergo volume loss during spreading and swelling upon activation,…
Spatial organization of chromatin plays a critical role in genome regulation. Various types of affinity mediators and enzymes have been attributed to regulate spatial organization of chromatin from a thermodynamics perspective. However, at…
In growing active matter systems, a large collection of engineered or living autonomous units metabolize free energy and create order at different length scales as they proliferate and migrate collectively. One such example is bacterial…