Related papers: Active shape control by plants in dynamic environm…

Plant morphogenesis relies on dynamic growth deformations at the cell and tissue scales driven by osmotic fluxes. A mechanistic understanding of this phenomenon demands a physical framework that integrates cell imbibition, tissue mechanics,…

Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…

Biological growth is often driven by mechanical cues, such as changes in external pressure or tensile loading. Moreover, it is well known that many living tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal stress, called the…

Nutation is an oscillatory movement that plants display during their development. Despite its ubiquity among plants movements, the relation between the observed movement and the underlying biological mechanisms remains unclear. Here we show…

In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…

Plant organ outgrowth superficially appears like the continuous mechanical deformation of a sheet of cells. Yet, how precisely cells as individual mechanical entities can act to morph a tissue reliably and efficiently into three dimensions…

The capability to sense and respond to external mechanical stimuli at various timescales is essential to many physiological aspects in plants, including self-protection, intake of nutrients, and reproduction. Remarkably, some plants have…

A new model for biological growth is introduced that couples the geometry of an organism (or part of the organism) to the flow and deposition of material. The model has three dynamical variables (a) a Riemann metric tensor for the geometry,…

Plants solve complex problems without centralized control, relying instead on growth-driven dynamics to sense, navigate, and optimize resource acquisition. This review presents a unified physical framework for understanding plant behavior…

Many structural properties of conventional passive materials are known to arise from the symmetries of their microscopic constituents. By contrast, it is largely unclear how the interplay between cell shape and self-propulsion controls the…

Robust adaptive control of scalar plants in the presence of unmodeled dynamics is established in this paper. It is shown that implementation of a projection algorithm with standard adaptive control of a scalar plant ensures global…

Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…

Tendrils coil their shape to anchor the plant to supporting structures, allowing vertical growth toward light. Although climbing plants have been studied for a long time, extracting information regarding the relationship between the…

Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…

We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…

Plant-soil feedback is recognized as a causal mechanism for the emergence of vegetation patterns of the same species especially when water is not a limiting resource (e.g. humid environments). Nevertheless, in the field, plants rarely grow…

Rod-like bacteria maintain their cylindrical shapes with remarkable precision during growth. However, they are also capable to adapt their shapes to external forces and constraints, for example by growing into narrow or curved confinements.…

Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…

Cell motility in dense cell collectives is pivotal in various diseases like cancer metastasis and asthma. A central aspect in these phenomena is the heterogeneity in cell motility, but identifying the motility of individual cells is…

In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…