Related papers: Mechano-chemical active feedback generates converg…

The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…

Epiboly, during which a tissue closes around the surface of the egg, pervades animal development. This epithelial gap closure involves cell intercalations at the edge of the gap. Here, inspired by serosa closure in the beetle Tribolium, we…

Active nematic models explain the topological defects and flow patterns observed in epithelial tissues, but the nature of active stress-whether it is extensile or contractile, a key parameter of the theory-is not well established…

Many tissues take the form of thin sheets, being only a single cell thick, but millions of cells wide. These tissue sheets can bend and buckle in the third dimension. In this work, we investigated the growth and shrinkage of suspended and…

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…

Cell monolayers and epithelial tissues display slow dynamics during the liquid-glass transitions, a phenomenon with direct relevance to embryogenesis, tumor metastases, and wound healing. In active cells, persistent motion and cell…

Active solids combine internal active driving with elasticity to realize states with nonequilibrium mechanics and autonomous motion. They are often studied in overdamped settings, e.g., in soft materials, and the role of inertia is less…

A constitutive relation between stress and strain relative to a reference state is the basic assumption of elasticity theory. However, in living matter, force generation is governed by motor molecule activity, which does not depend on…

The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…

Modeling the spontaneous evolution of morphology in natural systems and its preservation by proportionate growth remains a major scientific challenge. Yet, it is conceivable that if the basic mechanisms of growth and the coupled kinetic…

Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…

Many biological materials must couple mechanical strength with the ability to rapidly self-assemble at a specific location. In particular, biomolecular condensates readily self-assemble via phase separation, but may also need to resist…

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…

We derive an asymptotically consistent morphoelastic shell model to describe the finite deformations of biological tissues using the variational asymptotical method. Biological materials may exhibit remarkable compressibility when under…

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…

Coordinated movements of epithelia tissue are linked with active matter processes. We here consider the influence of curvature on the spatiotemporal arrangements and the shapes of the cells. The cells are represented by a multiphase field…

We investigate morphologies of proliferating cellular tissues using a newly developed numerical simulation model for mechanical cell division and migration in 2D. The model is applied to a bimodal mixture consisting of stiff cells with a…

Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…

The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…

Initial residual stress is omnipresent in biological tissues and soft matter, and can affect growth-induced pattern selection significantly. Here we demonstrate this effect experimentally by letting soft tubes grow in the presence or…