Related papers: Quantifying tissue growth, shape and collision via…
In this paper we address some modelling issues related to biological growth. Our treatment is based on a recently-proposed, general formulation for growth within the context of Mixture Theory (Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids,…
We present a quantitative measure of physical complexity, based on the amount of information required to build a given physical structure through self-assembly. Our procedure can be adapted to any given geometry, and thus to any given type…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
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…
Cellular functions are established through biological evolution, but are constrained by the laws of physics. For instance, the physics of protein folding limits the lengths of cellular polypeptide chains. Consequently, many cellular…
We consider two bivariate models with two-way interactions in context of risk and queueing theory. The two entities interact with each other by providing assistance but otherwise evolve independently. We focus on certain random quantities…
Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom, but also on the cellular level. In cancer for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of…
We present a theoretical framework based on an extension of dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) for describing the structure and dynamics of cells in living tissues and tumours. DDFT is a microscopic statistical mechanical theory for…
Several biological tissues undergo changes in their geometry and in their bulk material properties by modelling and remodelling processes. Modelling synthesises tissue in some regions and removes tissue in others. Remodelling overwrites old…
Soft tissues - such as ligaments and tendons - primarily consist of solid (collagen, predominantly) and liquid phases. Understanding the interaction between such components and how they change under physiological loading sets the basis for…
There is increasing interest in the analysis of biological tissue, its organization and its dynamics with the help of mathematical models. In the ideal case emergent properties on the tissue scale can be derived from the cellular scale.…
Cell-cell adhesion plays a vital role in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. One of its functions is regulation of cell migration, such as occurs, e.g. during embryogenesis or in cancer. In this work, we develop a…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
Quantitative Fitness Analysis (QFA) is a high-throughput experimental and computational methodology for measuring the growth of microbial populations. QFA screens can be used to compare the health of cell populations with and without a…
The maintenance of tissue and organ structures during dynamic homeostasis is often not well understood. In order for a system to be stable, cell renewal, cell migration and cell death must be finely balanced. Moreover, a tissue's shape must…
When they are damaged or injured, soft biological tissues are able to self-repair and heal. Mechanics is critical during the healing process, as the damaged extracellular matrix (ECM) tends to be replaced with a new undamaged ECM supporting…
Collective cell migration is a highly regulated process involved in wound healing, cancer metastasis and morphogenesis. Mechanical interactions among cells provide an important regulatory mechanism to coordinate such collective motion.…
Advances in cellular imaging technologies, especially those based on fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) now allow detailed visualization of the spatial organization of human or bacterial cells. Quantifying this spatial organization…
Modern biology and biomedicine are undergoing a big-data explosion needing advanced computational algorithms to extract mechanistic insights on the physiological state of living cells. We present the motivation for the Cell Physiome: a…
Contact inhibition refers to a reduction in the rate of cell migration and/or cell proliferation in regions of high cell density. Under normal conditions contact inhibition is associated with the proper functioning tissues, whereas abnormal…