Related papers: Many-body interactions between contracting living …
We consider large deviations of the dynamical activity in the East model. We bias this system to larger than average activity and investigate the structure that emerges. To best characterise this structure, we exploit the fact that there…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
The migratory dynamics of cells in physiological processes, ranging from wound healing to cancer metastasis, rely on contact-mediated cell-cell interactions. These interactions play a key role in shaping the stochastic trajectories of…
Phase separation, crucial for spatially segregating biomolecules in cells, is well-understood in the simple case of a few components with pairwise interactions. Yet, biological cells challenge the simple picture in at least two ways: First,…
Biological systems are notorious for complex behavior within short timescales (e.g. metabolic activity) and longer time scales (e.g. evolutionary selection), along with their complex spatial organization. Because of their complexity and…
Cell division and death can be regulated by the mechanical forces within a tissue. We study the consequences for the stability and roughness of a propagating interface, by analysing a model of mechanically-regulated tissue growth in the…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
Cellular cortex, which is a highly viscous thin cytoplasmic layer just below the cell membrane, controls the cell's mechanical properties, which can be characterized by a hydrodynamic length scale $\ell$. Cells actively regulate $\ell$ via…
The collective behaviour of confluent cell sheets is strongly influenced both by polar forces, arising through cytoskeletal propulsion and by active inter-cellular forces, which are mediated by interactions across cell-cell junctions. We…
We study how hydrodynamic interactions affect the collective behaviour of active particles suspended in a fluid at high concentrations, with particular attention to lubrication forces which appear when the particles are very close to one…
Cell-cell adhesion plays a vital role in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. One of its functions is regulation of cell migration, such as occurs, e.g. during embryogenesis or in cancer. In this work, we develop a…
The response of cells during spreading and motility is dictated by several multi-physics events, which are triggered by extracellular cues and occur at different time-scales. For this sake, it is not completely appropriate to provide a cell…
Pulsatory activity patterns, driven by mechanochemical feedback, are prevalent in many biological systems. Here we present a theoretical framework to elucidate the mechanical origin and regulation of pulsatile activity patterns within…
Dipolar interactions govern the structure and dynamics of many soft-matter systems, from molecular to colloids assemblies. When dipole moments are induced by an external field, mutual interactions lead to a many-body magnetization response…
The migration behavior of colliding cells is critically determined by transient contact-interactions. During these interactions, the motility machinery, including the front-rear polarization of the cell, dynamically responds to surface…
We report various many-body theoretical approaches to the nonlinear decay rate and energy loss of charged particles moving in an interacting free electron gas. These include perturbative formulations of the scattering matrix, the…
During overflow metabolism, cells excrete glycolytic byproducts when growing under aerobic conditions in a seemingly wasteful fashion. While potentially advantageous for microbes with finite oxidative capacity, its role in higher organisms…