Related papers: Mechanics of pressurized cellular sheets
Control of gas exchange between a leafs interior and the surrounding air is accomplished by variations in the turgor pressures in the small epidermal and guard cells that cover the leafs surface. These pressures respond to changes in light…
It is established that the mechanical properties of hydrogels control the fate of (stem) cells. However, despite its importance, a one-to-one correspondence between gels' stiffness and cell behaviour is still missing from literature. In…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
Two types of high-strength composite hydrogels possessing the structure of interpenetrating polymer networks were synthesized via free-radical polymerization of acrylamide carried out straight within the matrix of plant or bacterial…
Actin flow in the cortical cytoskeleton underneath the cell membrane generates mechanical stresses that shape the cell surface. We study this mechanism using a hydrodynamic model of a compressible active gel polymerizing at the membrane and…
Compression stiffening, or an increase in shear modulus with increasing compressive strain, has been observed in recent rheometry experiments on brain, liver, and fat tissues. Here, we extend the known types of biomaterials exhibiting this…
Induced by proteins within the cell membrane or by differential growth, heating, or swelling, spontaneous curvatures can drastically affect the morphology of thin bodies and induce mechanical instabilities. Yet, the interaction of…
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 balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
Many tissues take the form of thin sheets, being only a single cell thick, but millions of cells wide. These tissue sheets can bend and buckle in the third dimension. In this work, we investigated the growth and shrinkage of suspended and…
Since Charles Darwin's time, the study of climbing plants on a cylindrical stake has been the subject of numerous articles in plant biology. One of the main ideas for studying the coiling of an elastic plant stem is to consider the growth…
Shape is one of the important characteristics for the structures observed in living organisms. Whereas biologists have proposed models where the shape is controlled on a molecular level [1], physicists, following Turing [2] and d'Arcy…
We report the simultaneous characterization of time- and force-dependent mechanical properties of adherent cells in the physiologically relevant regime of large forces. We used magnetic tweezers to apply forces to magnetic beads bound to…
The phenomenon of crumpling is common in our daily life and nature. It exhibits many interesting properties, such as ultra-tough resistance to pressure with less than 30$\%$ of volume density, power-law relation for pressure vs density, and…
The mechanical properties of the cell depend crucially on the tension of its cytoskeleton, a biopolymer network that is put under stress by active motor proteins. While the fibrous nature of the network is known to strongly affect the…
It is well-known that a thin sheet held in a rigid circular clamp has a larger flexural strength than when it is flat. Here, we report that the flexural strength of curved sheets is further increased with a softening of the clamping…
Most granular packings possess shear moduli ($G$) that increase with the applied external pressure, and bulk moduli ($B$) that increase or remain constant with pressure. This paper presents "tessellated" granular metamaterials for which…
One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…
We present a novel buckling instability relevant to membrane budding in eukaryotic cells. In this mechanism, curved filaments bind to a lipid bilayer without changing its intrinsic curvature. As more and more filaments adsorb, newly added…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…