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Many critical biological processes, like wound healing, require confluent cell monolayers/bulk tissues to transition from a jammed solid-like to a fluid-like state. Although numerical studies anticipate changes in the cell shape alone can…
Characterizing the local structural evolution is an essential step in understanding the nature of glass transition. In this work, we probe the evolution of Voronoi cell geometry in simple glass models, and find that the individual particle…
Cell-based, mathematical modeling of collective cell behavior has become a prominent tool in developmental biology. Cell-based models represent individual cells as single particles or as sets of interconnected particles, and predict the…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
In tissue development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, coordinated cell motion arises from active forces produced by the cells. The relationship between force and motion remains unclear, however, because the forces result from a sum of…
The rheology of biological tissue is key to processes such as embryo development, wound healing and cancer metastasis. Vertex models of confluent tissue monolayers have uncovered a spontaneous liquid-solid transition tuned by cell shape;…
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…
Coordinated motion of cell monolayers during epithelial wound healing and tissue morphogenesis involves mechanical stress generation. Here we propose a model for the dynamics of epithelial expansion that couples mechanical deformations in…
Many types of motile cells perform durotaxis, namely, directed migration following gradients of substrate stiffness. Recent experiments have revealed that cell monolayers can migrate toward stiffer regions even when individual cells do not…
The mechanical behaviour of solid biological tissues has long been described using models based on classical continuum mechanics. However, the classical continuum theories of elasticity and viscoelasticity cannot easily capture the…
Collective cell migration underlies important biological processes, such as embryonic development, wound healing and cancer invasion. While many aspects of single cell movements are now well established, the mechanisms leading to…
Experimental evidence shows that there is a feedback between cell shape and cell motion. How this feedback impacts the collective behavior of dense cell monolayers remains an open question. We investigate the effect of a feedback that tends…
Vertex Models, as used to describe cellular tissue, have an energy controlled by deviations of each cell area and perimeter from target values. The constrained nonlinear relation between area and perimeter leads to new mechanical response.…
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…
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…
Collections of cells exhibit coherent migration during morphogenesis, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In many cases, bigger clusters split, smaller sub-clusters collide and reassemble, and gaps continually emerge. The connections…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating the motility of…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…