Related papers: Mechanical Interactions Govern Self-Organized Orde…
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…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
The relationship between division of labor and individuals' spatial behavior in social insect colonies provides a useful context to study how social interactions influence the spreading of agent (which could be information or virus) across…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
Growth drives cellular dynamics in dense aggregates including bacterial colonies, developing tissues, and tumors. We investigate the underlying physical principles emerging from the interplay of growth, steric repulsion, and motility in a…
Bacterial cells exhibit a diverse array of shapes and sizes, largely governed by their cell walls in conjunction with cytoskeletal proteins and internal turgor pressure. The present study develops a theoretical framework for modeling the…
Formation of bacterial colonies as biofilm on the surface/interface of various objects has the potential to impact not only human health and disease but also energy and environmental considerations. Biofilms can be regarded as soft…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
Microscopic organisms, such as bacteria, have the ability of colonizing surfaces and developing biofilms that can determine diseases and infections. Most bacteria secrete a significant amount of extracellular polymer substances that are…
We study the clustering of a model cyanobacterium \textit{Synechocystis} into microcolonies. The bacteria are allowed to diffuse onto surfaces of different hardness, and interact with the others by aggregation and detachment. We find that…
Bacterial chromosome replication occurs in the absence of a canonical spindle apparatus; yet it reliably produces organised and segregated genomes. While both passive and active mechanisms have been investigated, DNA replication itself is a…
Cells within living soft biological tissues seem to promote the maintenance of a mechanical state within a defined range near a so-called set-point. This mechanobiological process is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. During this…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
Mobile microrobots are envisioned to be useful in a wide range of high-impact applications, many of which requiring cohesive group formation to maintain self-bounded swarms in the absence of confining boundaries. Cohesive group formation…
The ability of cells to reorganize in response to external stimuli is important in areas ranging from morphogenesis to tissue engineering. Elongated cells can co-align due to steric effects, forming states with local order. We show that…
Information processing in the mammalian brain relies on a careful regulation of the membrane potential dynamics of its constituent neurons, which propagates across the neuronal tissue via electrical signalling. We recently reported the…
We use a combination of unsupervised clustering and sparsity-promoting inference algorithms to learn locally dominant force balances that explain macroscopic pattern formation in self-organized active particle systems. The self-organized…
The mechanism of bacterial cell size control has been a mystery for decades, which involves the well-coordinated growth and division in the cell cycle. The revolutionary modern techniques of microfluidics and the advanced live imaging…