Related papers: Modelling how curved active proteins and shear flo…
Branched actin networks at the leading edge of a crawling cell evolve via protein-regulated processes such as polymerization, depolymerization, capping, branching, and severing. A formulation of these processes is presented and analyzed to…
Living cells adapt and respond actively to the mechanical properties of their environment. In addition to biochemical mechanotransduction, evidence exists for a myosin-dependent, purely mechanical sensitivity to the stiffness of the…
Cell crawling crucially depends on the collective dynamics of the acto-myosin cytoskeleton. However, it remains an open question to what extent cell polarization and persistent motion depend on continuous regulatory mechanisms and…
Active force generation by actin-myosin cortex coupled to the cell membrane allows the cell to deform, respond to the environment, and mediate cell motility and division. Several membrane-bound activator proteins move along it and couple to…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
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…
Collective cell migration is crucial in many biological processes such as wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and tumor progression. The leading front of a collective migrating epithelial cell layer often destabilizes into multicellular…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
We present a deformation-dependent propulsion phenomenon for soft particles such as cells in microchannels. It is based on a broken time reversal symmetry generated by a fast forward and slow backward motion of a fluid which does not…
When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the occurrence of inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials. We use rough walls to impose a simple shear flow and study the athermal motion of jammed assemblies of soft…
Curvature plays a central role in the proper function of many biological processes. With active matter being a standard framework for understanding many aspects of the physics of life, it is natural to ask what effect curvature has on the…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…
Amoeboid cell migration is characterized by frequent changes of the direction of motion and resembles a persistent random walk on long time scales. Although it is well known that cell migration is typically driven by the actin cytoskeleton,…
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…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
Understanding how cells escape from embedded spheroids requires a mechanical framework linking stress generation within cells, across cells, and between cells and the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM). We develop such a framework by…
Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing fraction is effectively fixed, the prevailing paradigm…
We study theoretically and numerically the coupling and rotational hydrodynamic interactions between spherical particles near a planar elastic membrane that exhibits resistance towards shear and bending. Using a combination of the multipole…