Related papers: Mechanical Interactions Govern Self-Organized Orde…
Rod-shaped bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, commonly live forming mounded colonies. They initially grow two-dimensionally on a surface and finally achieve three-dimensional growth. While it was recently reported that three-dimensional…
Assembly and stability of mitotic spindle is governed by the interplay of various intra-cellular forces, e.g. the forces generated by motor proteins by sliding overlapping anti-parallel microtubules (MTs) polymerized from the opposite…
As cells grow and divide under a given environment, they become crowded and resources are limited, as seen in bacterial biofilms and multicellular aggregates. These cells often show strong interactions through exchanging chemicals, as in…
Mechanical forces influence the dynamics of growing tissues. Computer simulations are employed to study the importance of interfacial effects in tissue competition. It was speculated that mechanical pressure determines the competition,…
We report three-dimensional particle mechanics static calculations that predict the microstructure evolution during die-compaction of elastic spherical particles up to relative densities close to one. We employ a nonlocal contact…
Biomolecular condensates play a crucial role in the spatial organization of living matter. These membrane-less organelles, resulting from liquid-liquid phase separation, operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium, with their size and…
Living cells adapt and respond actively to the mechanical properties of their environment. In addition to biochemical mechanotransduction, evidence exists for a myosin-dependent, purely mechanical sensitivity to the stiffness of the…
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
Living systems contain intricate biochemical networks whose structure is closely related to their function and allows them to exhibit robust behavior in the presence of external stimuli. Such networks typically involve catalytic enzymes,…
A simulation approach to the stochastic growth of bacterial towers is presented, in which a non-uniform and finite nutrient supply essentially determines the emerging structure through elementary chemotaxis. The method is based on cellular…
From intracellular protein trafficking to large scale motion of animal groups, the physical concepts driving the self-organization of living systems are still largely unraveled. Selforganization of active entities, leading to novel phases…
Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…
Emergence of regular spatial patterns is a hallmark in living matter ranging from subcellular organelles to developing embryos and to ecosystems. Mechanisms for the formation of ordered spatial patterns in biology often require chemical…
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…
Slicks are thin viscous films that can be found at the air--water interface of water bodies such as lakes, rivers and oceans. These micro-layers are enriched in surfactants, organic matter, and microorganisms, and exhibit steep physical and…
We consider a model for population dynamics such as for the evolution of bacterial colonies which is of the Fisher type but where the competitive interaction among individuals is non-local, and show that spatial structures with interesting…
Bacterial microcompartments are large, roughly icosahedral shells that assemble around enzymes and reactants involved in certain metabolic pathways in bacteria. Motivated by microcompartment assembly, we use coarse-grained computational and…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
Phase separation into compositionally and physically distinct domains is ubiquitous in (non)living matter ranging from alloys and emulsions to biomolecular condensates in cells. The organization of these domains can be controlled, for…
Biased locomotion is a common feature of microorganisms, but little is known about its impact on self-organisation. Inspired by recent experiments showing a transition to large-scale flows, we study theoretically the dynamics of…