Related papers: Epithelial layer fluidization by curvature-induced…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
Colloids and proteins alike can bind to lipid bilayers and move laterally in these two-dimensional fluids. Inspired by proteins that generate membrane curvature, sense the underlying membrane geometry, and migrate to high curvature sites,…
Eukaryotic cells intrinsically change their shape, by changing the composition of their membrane and by restructuring their underlying cytoskeleton. We present here further studies and extensions of a minimal physical model, describing a…
Cellular membranes are elastic lipid bilayers that contain a variety of proteins, including ion channels, receptors, and scaffolding proteins. These proteins are known to diffuse in the plane of the membrane and to influence the bending of…
Cell migration is a fundamental process involved in physiological phenomena such as the immune response and morphogenesis, but also in pathological processes, such as the development of tumor metastasis. These functions are effectively…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
In development and homeostasis, multi-cellular systems exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity in their biochemical and mechanical properties. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how spatiotemporally heterogeneous forces affect the…
Most biological tissues grow by the synthesis of new material close to the tissue's interface, where spatial interactions can exert strong geometric influences on the local rate of growth. These geometric influences may be mechanistic, or…
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…
Epithelial tissues form physically integrated barriers against the external environment protecting organs from infection and invasion. Within each tissue, epithelial cells respond to different challenges that can potentially compromise…
The motion of a eukaryotic cell presents a variety of interesting and challenging problems from both a modeling and a computational perspective. The processes span many spatial scales (from molecular to tissue) as well as disparate time…
Movement of cell clusters along extracellular matrices (ECM) during tissue development, wound healing, and early stage of cancer invasion involve various inter-connected migration modes such as: (1) cell movement within clusters, (2)…
Cell shape changes are largely controlled by the actin cytoskeleton, a dynamic filament network beneath the plasma membrane. Several cell types can form extended free-standing protrusions not supported by an extracellular substrate or…
Cellular uptake through the lipid membranes plays an important role in adsorbing nutrients and fighting infection and can be used for drug delivery and nanomedicine developments. Endocytosis is one of the known pathways of the cellular…
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating the motility of…
Epithelial tissues play a fundamental role in various morphogenetic events during development and early embryogenesis. Although epithelial monolayers are often modeled as two-dimensional (2D) elastic surfaces, they distinguish themselves…
Amorphous materials as diverse as foams, emulsions, colloidal suspensions and granular media can {\em jam} into a rigid, disordered state where they withstand finite shear stresses before yielding. The jamming transition has been studied…
We conduct athermal simulations of freely-cooling, viscous soft spheres around the jamming transition density \phi_{J}, and find evidence for a growing length \xi(t) that governs relaxation to mechanical equilibrium. \xi(t) is manifest in…
Clathrin-mediated endocytosis is the main pathway used by eukaryotic cells to take up extracellular material, but the dominant physical mechanisms driving this process are still elusive. Recently several high-resolution imaging techniques…
Cell motion inside dense tissues governs many biological processes, including embryonic development and cancer metastasis, and recent experiments suggest that these tissues exhibit collective glassy behavior. To make quantitative…