Related papers: Basolateral mechanics prevents rigidity transition…
The mammalian cell membrane is embedded with biomolecular condensates of protein and lipid clusters, which interact with an underlying viscoelastic cytoskeleton network to organize the cell surface and mechanically interact with the…
The organization of cells within tissues plays a vital role in various biological processes, including development and morphogenesis. As a result, understanding how cells self-organize in tissues has been an active area of research. In our…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
Collective behaviors in cellular systems are regulated not only by biochemical signalling pathways but also by intercellular mechanical forces, whose quantification in contractile monolayers remains poorly understood. Here, by integrating…
Eukaryotic cell motility involves a complex network of interactions between biochemical components and mechanical processes. The cell employs this network to polarize and induce shape changes that give rise to membrane protrusions and…
During development, epithelial tissues undergo extensive morphogenesis based on coordinated changes of cell shape and position over time. Continuum mechanics describes tissue mechanical state and shape changes in terms of strain and stress.…
Cross-sections of cell shapes in a tissue monolayer typically resemble a tiling of convex polygons. Yet, examples exist where the polygons are not convex with curved cell-cell interfaces, as seen in the adaxial epidermis. To date,…
We propose a three dimensional mechanical model of embryonic tissue dynamics. Mechanically coupled adherent cells are represented as particles interconnected with elastic beams which can exert non-central forces and torques. Tissue…
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…
Epithelial monolayers are a central building block of complex organisms. Topological defects have emerged as important elements for single cell behavior in flat epithelia. Here we theoretically study such defects in a three-dimensional…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
This article reviews the mechanical bidomain model, a mathematical description how the extracellular matrix and intracellular cytoskeleton are coupled by integrin proteins. The fundamental hypothesis is that differences between…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
Epithelial cells can assemble into cohesive colonies and collectively interact with substrates by generating extracellular forces through focal adhesions. Recently, a molecularly based thermodynamic model, which integrates both the…
We generated a computational approach to analyze the biomechanics of epithelial cell aggregates, either island or stripes or entire monolayers, that combines both vertex and contact-inhibition-of-locomotion models to include both cell-cell…
Dynamic lateral transport of lipids, proteins, and self-assembled structures in biomembranes plays crucial roles in diverse cellular processes. In this study, we perform a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation on a vesicle composed…
Many mature bacterial colonies and biofilms are complex three-dimensional (3D) structures. One key step in their developmental program is a transition from a two-dimensional (2D) monolayer into a 3D architecture. Despite the importance of…
Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
A number of factors, such as, cell-cell interactions and self-propulsion of cells driven by cytoskeletal forces determine tissue morphologies and dynamics. To explore the interplay between these factors in controlling the dynamics at the…
Eukaryotic cells possess motility mechanisms allowing them not only to self-propel but also to exert forces on obstacles (to push) and to carry cargoes (to pull). To study the inherent asymmetry between active pushing and pulling we model a…