Related papers: Mechanisms enabling efficient fountain-flow suprac…
While cell crawling on a solid surface is relatively well understood, and relies on substrate adhesion, some cells can also swim in the bulk, through mechanisms that are still largely unclear. Here, we propose a minimal model for in-bulk…
Cell crawling on flat substrates is based on intracellular flows of the actin cytoskeleton that are driven by both actin polymerization at the front and myosin contractility at the back. The new experimental tool of optogenetics makes it…
Cell migration in confining physiological environments relies on the concerted dynamics of several cellular components, including protrusions, adhesions with the environment, and the cell nucleus. However, it remains poorly understood how…
The combination of protrusions and retractions in the movement of polarized cells leads to understand the effect of possible synchronisation between the two ends of the cells. This synchronisation, in turn, could lead to different dynamics…
Movement of cell clusters along extracellular matrices (ECM) during tissue development, wound healing, and early stage of cancer invasion involve various inter-connected migration modes such as: (1) cell movement within clusters, (2)…
In systems as diverse as migrating mammals to road traffic, crowding acts to inhibit efficient collective movement. Bacteria, however, are observed to move in very dense groups containing billions of individuals without causing the gridlock…
Intracellular transport is essential for maintaining proper cellular function in most eukaryotic cells, with perturbations in active transport resulting in several types of disease. Efficient delivery of critical cargos to specific…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
The capability of cells to form surface extensions to non-locally probe the surrounding environment plays a key role in cell migration. The existing mathematical models for migration of cell populations driven by this non-local form of…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Spontaneous directed motion, a hallmark of cell biology, is unusual in classical statistical physics. Here we study, using both numerical and analytical methods, organized motion in models of the cytoskeleton in which constituents are…
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
The interaction of the actin cytoskeleton with cell-substrate adhesions is necessary for cell migration. While the trajectories of motile cells have a stochastic character, investigations of cell motility mechanisms rarely elaborate on the…
A qualitative model is presented, suggesting gravitational information is transduced into biological systems primarily by its effect on spatially organised membrane and cytoplasmic flows. Continuous low affinity interactions between…
We formulate an active-gel theory for multicellular migration in the extra-cellular matrix (ECM). The cells are modeled as an active, polar solvent, and the ECM as a viscoelastic solid. Our theory enables to analyze the dynamic reciprocity…
The eukaryotic cell's cytoskeleton is a prototypical example of an active material: objects embedded within it are driven by molecular motors acting on the cytoskeleton, leading to anomalous diffusive behavior. Experiments tracking the…
We propose an alternative mechanism for intracellular cargo transport which results from motor induced longitudinal fluctuations of cytoskeletal microtubules (MT). The longitudinal fluctuations combined with transient cargo binding to the…
Migration of animal cells is based on the interplay between actin polymerization at the front, adhesion along the cell-substrate interface, and actomyosin contractility at the back. Active gel theory has been used before to demonstrate that…
The migratory dynamics of cells can be influenced by the complex micro-environment through which they move. It remains unclear how the motility machinery of confined cells responds and adapts to their micro-environment. Here, we propose a…
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…