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Collective behavior in cellular populations is coordinated by biochemical signaling networks within individual cells. Connecting the dynamics of these intracellular networks to the population phenomena they control poses a considerable…
Responsive hydrogels can sense environmental stimuli and respond as actuators by expelling water and changing shape. In this article, we develop theory to demonstrate that groups of responsive hydrogels can also communicate with each other,…
Active fluids generate spontaneous, often chaotic mesoscale flows. Harnessing these flows to drive embedded soft materials into structures with controlled length scales and lifetimes is a key challenge at the interface between the fields of…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
In many physical systems, degrees of freedom are coupled \emph{via} hydrodynamic forces, even in the absence of Hamiltonian interactions. A particularly important and widespread example concerns the transport of microscopic particles in…
We examine a minimal model for an active colloidal fluid in the form of self-propelled Brownian hard spheres that interact purely through excluded volume. Despite the absence of an aligning interaction, this system shows the signature…
Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…
The transport properties of colloidal particles in active liquids have been studied extensively. It has led to a deeper understanding of the interactions between passive and active particles. However, the phase behavior of colloidal…
Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
We study the collective behaviour of an ensemble of coupled motile elements whose interactions depend on time and are alternatively attractive or repulsive. The evolution of interactions is driven by individual internal variables with…
The creation of synthetic systems that emulate the defining properties of living matter, such as motility, gradient-sensing, signalling and replication, is a grand challenge of biomimetics. Such imitations of life crucially contain active…
Minimal models of active Brownian colloids consisting of self-propelled spherical particles with purely repulsive interactions have recently been identified as excellent quantitative testing grounds for theories of active matter and have…
Biomolecular condensates play a central role in the spatial organization of living matter. Their formation is now well understood as a form of liquid-liquid phase separation that occurs very far from equilibrium. For instance, they can be…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
In many biological systems localized mechanical information is transmitted by mechanically neutral chemical signals. Typical examples include contraction waves in acto-myosin cortex at cellular scale and peristaltic waves at tissue level.…
The paper presents a two-phase hydrodynamic model for the numerical simulation of collective motion in a thin layer of active colloids containing spherical microswimmers. The model accounts for three fundamental mechanisms governing the…
Fundamental biological and biomimetic processes, from tissue morphogenesis to soft robotics, rely on the propagation of chemical and mechanical surface waves to signal and coordinate active force generation. The complex interplay between…
Predicting the rheological behavior of associative polymers bridging colloidal particles into transient networks is fundamentally challenging because the coupled spatiotemporal scales prevent efficient molecular-fidelity modeling. We…