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Everyday experience shows that cellular sheets are stiffened by the presence of a pressurized gas: from bicycle inner tubes to bubble wrap, the presence of an internal pressure increases the stiffness of otherwise floppy structures. The…
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…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
Recent work on particle-based models of tissues has suggested that any finite rate of cell division and cell death is sufficient to fluidize an epithelial tissue. At the same time, experimental evidence has indicated the existence of glassy…
Cell invasion and spatial pattern formation are two distinct manifestations of cellular self-organisation in development, regeneration, and disease. Here, we develop and analyse a unified theoretical framework that links these two seemingly…
Endocytosis is an essential process by which cells internalize a piece of plasma membrane and material from the outside. In cells with turgor, pressure opposes membrane defor- mations, and increases the amount of force that has to be…
Gaining access to the cell interior is fundamental for many applications, such as electrical recording, drug and biomolecular delivery. A very promising technique consists of culturing cells on nano/micro pillars. The tight adhesion and…
Here we show that coupling to curvature has profound effects on collective motion in active systems, leading to patterns not observed in flat space. Biological examples of such active motion in curved environments are numerous: curvature…
The duality between deformations of elastic bodies and non-inertial flows in viscous liquids has been a guiding principle in decades of research. However, this duality is broken when a spheroidal or other doubly-curved liquid film is…
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…
We study the shape, elasticity and fluctuations of the recently predicted (cond-mat/9510172) and subsequently observed (in numerical simulations) (cond-mat/9705059) tubule phase of anisotropic membranes, as well as the phase transitions…
Cell shape is fundamental in biology. The average cell shape can influence crucial biological functions, such as cell fate and division orientation. But cell-to-cell shape variability is often regarded as noise. In contrast, recent works…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
Autophagy is an intracellular degradation process that is mediated by de novo formation of autophagosomes. Autophagosome formation involves dynamic morphological changes; a disk-shaped membrane cisterna grows, bends to become a cup-shaped…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
Conical inclusions in a lipid bilayer generate an overall spontaneous curvature of the membrane that depends on concentration and geometry of the inclusions. Examples are integral and attached membrane proteins, viruses, and lipid domains.…
We present a minimal continuum model of strongly adhering cells as active contractile isotropic media and use the model to study the effect of the geometry of the adhesion patch in controlling the spatial distribution of traction and…
We derive an asymptotically consistent morphoelastic shell model to describe the finite deformations of biological tissues using the variational asymptotical method. Biological materials may exhibit remarkable compressibility when under…
We present a theory that combines the framework of irreversible thermodynamics with modified integral theorems to model arbitrarily curved and deforming membranes immersed in bulk fluid solutions. We study the coupling between the mechanics…
A constitutive relation between stress and strain relative to a reference state is the basic assumption of elasticity theory. However, in living matter, force generation is governed by motor molecule activity, which does not depend on…