Related papers: Basolateral mechanics prevents rigidity transition…
A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier that they…
A theoretical model for stratified epithelium is presented. The viscoelastic properties of the tissue is assumed to be dependent on the spatial distribution of proliferative and differentiated cells. Based on this assumption, a hydrodynamic…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Cell migration is important in many biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly constrained by its neighbors, leading to glassy dynamics.…
Tissue boundaries pattern embryos, suppress tumours, and provide directional cues. Tissue boundaries are associated with supracellular cables formed by actin and the molecular motor non-muscle myosin II. Actomyosin cables generate tension…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
This work investigates the morphological stability of a soft body composed of two heavy elastic layers, attached to a rigid surface and subjected only to the bulk gravity force. Using theoretical and computational tools, we characterize the…
The vertex model is widely used to describe the dynamics of epithelial tissues, because of its simplicity and versatility and the direct inclusion of biophysical parameters. Here, it is shown that quite generally, when cells modify their…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
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…
We consider a multiscale approach based on immersed methods for the efficient computational modeling of tissues composed of an elastic matrix (in two or three-dimensions) and a thin vascular structure (treated as a co-dimension two…
The relationship between cell density and velocity is often assumed to be negative, reflecting crowding-induced suppression of movement. However, observations across systems reveal a more nuanced picture: while some emphasize contact…
Epithelial tissues form physically integrated barriers against the external environment protecting organs from infection and invasion. Within each tissue, epithelial cells respond to different challenges that can potentially compromise…
We propose a general multiscale approach for the mechanical behavior of three-dimensional networks of macromolecules undergoing strain-induced unfolding. Starting from a (statistically based) energetic analysis of the macromolecule…
Cells and tissues change shape both to carry out their function and during pathology. In most cases, these deformations are driven from within the systems themselves. This is permitted by a range of molecular actors, such as active…
We propose a model that accounts for the budding transition of asymmetric two-component lipid domains, where the two monolayers (leaflets) have different average compositions controlled by independent chemical potentials. Assuming a…
Macroscopic properties and shapes of biological tissues depend on the remodelling of cell-cell junctions at the microscopic scale. We propose a theoretical framework that couples a vertex model of solid confluent tissues with the dynamics…
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…
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…
The rheology of biological tissue plays an important role in many processes, from organ formation to cancer invasion. Here, we use a multi-phase field model of motile cells to simulate active microrheology within a tissue monolayer. When…