Related papers: Self-organized intracellular twisters
The nature of emergent collective behaviors of moving physical agents interacting with their neighborhood is a long-standing open issue in physical and biological systems alike. This calls for studies on the control of synchronization and…
Cells control fluid flows with a spatial and temporal precision that far exceeds the capabilities of current microfluidic technologies. Cells achieve this superior spatio-temporal control by harnessing dynamic networks of cytoskeleton and…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Active biological flow networks pervade nature and span a wide range of scales, from arterial blood vessels and bronchial mucus transport in humans to bacterial flow through porous media or plasmodial shuttle streaming in slime molds.…
We harness the momentum of light resonating inside a micro-droplet cavity, to experimentally generate micro-flows within the envelope of the drop. We 3D map these optically induced flows by using fluorescent nanoparticles; which reveals…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…
The encapsulation of active particles, such as bacteria or active colloids, inside a droplet gives rise to nontrivial shape dynamics and droplet motility. To understand this behavior, we derive an asymptotic solution for the fluid flow…
Emergence of regular spatial patterns is a hallmark in living matter ranging from subcellular organelles to developing embryos and to ecosystems. Mechanisms for the formation of ordered spatial patterns in biology often require chemical…
The swimming of cells, far from any boundary, can arise in the absence of long-range liquid-crystalline order within the cytoplasm, but simple models of this effect are lacking. Here we present a two-dimensional model of droplet…
The spontaneous emergence of collective flows is a generic property of active fluids and often leads to chaotic flow patterns characterised by swirls, jets, and topological disclinations in their orientation field. However, the ability to…
In swimming microorganisms and the cell cytoskeleton, inextensible fibers resist bending and twisting, and interact with the surrounding fluid to cause or resist large-scale fluid motion. In this paper, we develop a novel numerical method…
Microtubules are an essential physical building block of cellular systems. They are organized using specific crosslinkers, motors, and influencers of nucleation and growth. With the addition of anti-parallel crosslinkers, microtubule…
Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…
Flow networks are essential for both living organisms and enginneered systems. These networks often present complex dynamics controlled, at least in part, by their topology. Previous works have shown that topologically complex networks…
Cell neighbor exchanges are integral to tissue rearrangements in biology, including development and repair. Often these processes occur via topological T1 transitions analogous to those observed in foams, grains and colloids. However, in…
Active diffusion of intracellular components is emerging as an important process in cell biology. This process is mediated by complex assemblies of molecular motors and cytoskeletal filaments that drive force generation in the cytoplasm and…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
Active fluids operate by constantly dissipating energy at the particle level to perform a directed motion, yielding dynamics and phases without any equilibrium equivalent. The emerging behaviors have been studied extensively, yet…