Related papers: Shape Programming in Entropic Tissues
We develop a continuum theory to describe the collective dynamics of deformable epithelial cells, using two tensor order parameters to distinguish the force-generating active filaments in the cells from their shape. The theory demonstrates…
Epithelial tissues act as barriers and, therefore, must repair themselves, respond to environmental changes and grow without compromising their integrity. Consequently, they exhibit complex viscoelastic rheological behavior where…
We investigate a class of "shape allophiles" that fit together like puzzle pieces as a method to access and stabilize desired structures by controlling directional entropic forces. Squares are cut into rectangular halves, which are shaped…
Cell neighbor exchanges play a critical role in regulating tissue fluidity during epithelial morphogenesis and repair. In vivo, these neighbor exchanges are often hindered by the formation of transiently stable four-fold vertices, which can…
Unlike other tissue types, like epithelial tissue, which consist of cells with a much more homogeneous structure and function, the nervous tissue spans in a complex multilayer environment whose topographical features display a large…
In this paper we study how to shape temporal pulses to switch a bistable system between its stable steady states. Our motivation for pulse-based control comes from applications in synthetic biology, where it is generally difficult to…
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…
Topological defects are ubiquitous on surfaces with orientational order fields. Here, we study equilibrium states generated by the feedback between geometry and nematic order on fluid membranes with an integer topological defect. When the…
The dynamics of cellular pattern formation is crucial for understanding embryonic development and tissue morphogenesis. Recent studies have shown that human dermal fibroblasts cultured on liquid crystal elastomers can exhibit an increase in…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
Many cell types spontaneously order like nematic liquid crystals, and, as such, they form topological defects. While defects with topological charge $\pm$1/2 are common in cell monolayers, the defects with charge $\pm$1, relevant in the…
A common developmental process, called branching morphogenesis, generates the epithelial trees in a variety of organs, including the lungs, kidneys, and glands. How branching morphogenesis can create epithelial architectures of very…
Designing reconfigurable materials based on deformable nanoparticles (NPs) hinges on an understanding of the energetically-favored shapes these NPs can adopt. Using simulations, we show that hollow, deformable patchy NPs tailored with…
The mechanism by which cells measure the dimension of the organ in which they are embedded, and slow down their growth when the final size is reached, is a long-standing problem of developmental biology. The role of mechanics in this…
The shapes of cell membranes are largely regulated by membrane associated, curvature active, proteins. We use a numerical model of the membrane with elongated membrane inclusions, recently developed by us, which posses spontaneous…
Spatiotemporal patterns are common in biological systems. For electrically-coupled cells previous studies of pattern formation have mainly used external forcing as the main bifurcation parameter. The purpose of this paper is to show that…
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…
Growing tissues are highly dynamic, flowing on sufficiently long time-scales due to cell proliferation, migration and tissue remodeling. As a consequence, living tissues can be approximated as liquids. This means the shape of microtissues…
Branching morphogenesis generates epithelial trees which facilitate gas exchange, filtering, as well as secretion processes with their large surface to volume ratio. In this review, we focus on the developmental mechanisms that control the…
Although materials and processes are different from biological cells', brain mimicries led to tremendous achievements in massively parallel information processing via neuromorphic engineering. Inexistent in electronics, we describe how to…