Related papers: Mechanochemical Morphodynamics of Active Bacterial…
Bacteria commonly inhabit porous environments such as host tissues, soil, and marine sediments, where complex geometries constrain and redirect their motion. Although bacterial motility has been studied in porous media, the roles of cell…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
Motile bacteria can migrate along chemical gradients in a process known as chemotaxis. When exposed to uniform environmental stress, Escherichia coli cells coordinate their chemotactic responses to form millimeter-sized condensates…
Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…
Recent observations demonstrate that densely packed tissues exhibit features of glassy dynamics, such as caging behavior and dynamical heterogeneities, although it has remained unclear how single-cell properties control this behavior. Here…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…
Single molecule experiments on bacteriophages show an exponential scaling for the dependence of mobility on the length of DNA within the capsid. It has been suggested that this could be due to the "capstan mechanism" -- the exponential…
Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…
Biofilms are bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces. Thin homogeneous biofilms naturally formed on the walls of conducts may serve as biosensors, providing information on the status of microsystems (MEMS) without disrupting them.…
Dense bacterial suspensions at fluid interfaces provide a natural platform to explore active turbulence in a dimensional mismatch: active units are restricted to a two-dimensional surface, while the induced flows extend into the surrounding…
Bacterial cells navigate around their environment by directing their movement along chemical gradients. This process, known as chemotaxis, can promote the rapid expansion of bacterial populations into previously unoccupied territories.…
Complex tissue flows in epithelia are driven by intra- and inter-cellular processes that generate, maintain, and coordinate mechanical forces. There has been growing evidence that cell shape anisotropy, manifested as nematic order, plays an…
The swimming properties of an E. coli-type model bacterium are investigated by mesoscale hy- drodynamic simulations, combining molecular dynamics simulations of the bacterium with the multiparticle particle collision dynamics method for the…
Open cellular solids usually possess random microstructures that may contain a characteristic length scale, such as the cell size. This gives rise to size dependent mechanical properties where large systems behave differently from small…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
We propose a general parametrizable model to capture the dynamic interaction among bacteria in the formation of micro-colonies. micro-colonies represent the first social step towards the formation of structured multicellular communities…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
It is known that the orientation of cellulose microfibrils within plant cell walls has an important impact on the morphogenesis of plant cells and tissues. Viewing the shape of a plant cell as a square prism or cylinder with the axis…
Mechanical forces influence the development and behavior of biological tissues. In many situations these forces are exerted or resisted by elastic compliant structures such as the own-tissue cellular matrix or other surrounding tissues.…
Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…