Related papers: Temporal instability of the frontier between mecha…
A ubiquitous feature of living cells is their growth over time followed by division into daughter cells. How isogenic cell populations maintain size homeostasis, i.e., a narrow distribution of cell size, is an intriguing fundamental…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…
Flowing blood displays a phenomenon called margination, in which leukocytes and platelets are preferentially found near blood vessel walls, while erythrocytes are depleted from these regions. Here margination is investigated using direct…
We consider a class of biologically-motivated stochastic processes in which a unicellular organism divides its resources (volume or damaged proteins, in particular) symmetrically or asymmetrically between its progeny. Assuming the final…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
Tissue mechanical properties such as rigidity and fluidity, and changes in these properties driven by jamming-unjamming transitions (UJT), have come under recent highlight as mechanical markers of health and disease in various biological…
Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…
We study the steady state of an assembly of microtubules in a confined volume, analogous to the situation inside a cell where the cell boundary forms a natural barrier to growth. We show that the dynamical equations for growing and…
A stochastic process, when subject to resetting to its initial condition at a constant rate, generically reaches a non-equilibrium steady state. We study analytically how the steady state is approached in time and find an unusual relaxation…
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…
How can tissues generate large numbers of cells, yet keep the divisional load (the number of divisions along cell lineages) low in order to curtail the accumulation of somatic mutations and reduce the risk of cancer? To answer the question…
The mechanical properties of cells, which influence the properties of the tissue they belong to, are controlled by various mechanisms. Bi et al. theoretically demonstrated that density-independent rigidity transition occurs in…
During development and under normal physiological conditions, biological tissues are continuously subjected to substantial mechanical stresses. In response to large deformations cells in a tissue must undergo multicellular rearrangements in…
We study the invasion of an unstable state by a propagating front in a peculiar but generic situation where the invasion process exhibits a remnant instability. Here, remnant instability refers to the fact that the spatially constant…
One of the key characteristics of multicellular organisms is the ability to establish and maintain shapes, or morphologies, under a variety of physical and chemical perturbations. A quantitative description of the underlying morphological…
We have developed a novel scanning probe-based methodology to study cell biomechanics. The time dependence of the force exerted by the cell surface on a scanning probe at constant local deformation has been used to extract local…
In this paper we propose an existence and uniqueness theory for the solutions of a system of non-linear hyperbolic conservation laws, structured in age and maturity variables, representing a tissue environment. In particular we are…
It was shown previously that the current-carrying state of a Field Effect Transistor with asymmetric source and drain boundary conditions may become unstable against spontaneous generation of plasma waves [1]. By extending the analysis to…
Interfaces between stratified epithelia and their supporting stromas commonly exhibit irregular shapes. Undulations are particularly pronounced in dysplastic tissues and typically evolve into long, finger-like protrusions in carcinomas. In…
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…