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Mechanics and biochemical signaling are both often deregulated in cancer, leading to cancer cell phenotypes that exhibit increased invasiveness, proliferation, and survival. The dynamics and interactions of cytoskeletal components control…
The study of cells' dynamical properties is essential to a better understanding of several physiological processes. These properties are directly associated with cells' mechanical parameters experimentally achieved through physical stress.…
Living systems, from single cells to higher vertebrates, receive a continuous stream of non-stationary inputs that they sense, e.g., via cell surface receptors or sensory organs. Integrating these time-varying, multi-sensory, and often…
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…
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.…
During growth, tissue expands and deforms. Given its elastic properties, stresses emerge in an expanding and deforming tissue. Cell rearrangements can dissipate these stresses and numerous experiments confirm the viscoelastic properties of…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
In this work, we demonstrate that key aspects of the dynamical behavior of coral reefs at the macro scale, which evolve over time scales of centuries, can be accurately described using a model that integrates a few fundamental ecological…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Mechanical signaling plays a key role in biological processes like embryo development and cancer growth. One prominent way to probe mechanical properties of tissues is to study their response to externally applied forces. Using a…
Intracellular dynamics in living tissue are dominated by active transport driven by bioenergetic processes far from thermal equilibrium. Intracellular constituents typically execute persistent walks. In the limit of long mean-free paths,…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Pattern formation in active biological matter typically arises from the feedback between chemical concentration fields and mechanical stresses. The actomyosin cortex of cells is an archetypal example of an active thin film that displays…
Self-generated gradients have atttracted a lot of attention in the recent biological literature. It is considered as a robust strategy for a group of cells to find its way during a long journey. This note is intended to discuss various…
Shapes of biological membranes are dynamically regulated in living cells. Although membrane shape deformation by proteins at thermal equilibrium has been extensively studied, nonequilibrium dynamics have been much less explored. Recently,…
In the absence of environmental cues, a migrating cell performs an isotropic random motion. Recently, the breaking of this isotropy has been observed when cells move in the presence of asymmetric adhesive patterns. However, up to now the…