Related papers: Cell bulging and extrusion in a three-dimensional …
Although tissues are usually studied in isolation, this situation rarely occurs in biology, as cells, tissues, and organs, coexist and interact across scales to determine both shape and function. Here, we take a quantitative approach…
Biological membranes are able to exhibit various morphology due to the fluidity of the lipid molecules within the monolayers. The shape transformation of membranes has been well described by the classical Helfrich theory, which consists…
The properties of tissue interfaces -- between separate populations of cells, or between a group of cells and its environment -- has attracted intense theoretical, computational, and experimental study. Recent work on shape-based models…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
The mechanics of epithelial tissues, which is governed by forces generated in various cell domains, is often investigated using two-dimensional models that account for the apically-positioned actomyosin structures but neglect basolateral…
Eukaryotic cells possess motility mechanisms allowing them not only to self-propel but also to exert forces on obstacles (to push) and to carry cargoes (to pull). To study the inherent asymmetry between active pushing and pulling we model a…
Most biological tissues grow by the synthesis of new material close to the tissue's interface, where spatial interactions can exert strong geometric influences on the local rate of growth. These geometric influences may be mechanistic, or…
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.…
Membrane bending is an extensively studied problem from both modeling and experimental perspectives because of the wide implications of curvature generation in cell biology. Many of the curvature generating aspects in membranes can be…
It is widely recognized that the shape of epithelial cells is determined by the tension generated by the actomyosin cortex and the adhesion of cells to the substrate and to each other. To account for these biological and structural…
Many interesting shapes appearing in the biological world are formed by the onset of mechanical instability. In this work we consider how the build-up of residual stress can cause a solid to buckle. In all past studies a fictitious…
The shapes of cell membranes are largely regulated by membrane associated, curvature active, proteins. We use a numerical model of the membrane with elongated membrane inclusions, recently developed by us, which posses spontaneous…
In confluent cell monolayers, patterns of cell forces and motion are systematically altered near topological defects in cell shape. In turn, defects have been proposed to alter cell density, extrusion, and invasion, but it remains unclear…
Epithelia are confluent cell layers that self-organize into polygonal networks whose geometry encodes their mechanical state. A principal driver is the tunable contractility of the actomyosin cortex, which links cell-junction tension to…
Using a mean field approach and simulation, we study the non-linear mechanical response of the vertex model (VM) of biological tissue under compression and dilation. The VM is known to exhibit a transition between rigid and fluid-like, or…
We investigate the elasticity of unsupported epithelial monolayer and we discover that unlike a thin solid plate, which wrinkles if geometrically incompatible with the underlying substrate, the epithelium may do so even in absence of the…
The formation of microparticles requires the bending of the plasma membrane away from the cytosol. The capcity of the cell membrane to form a microparticle, and the rate of membrane deformation, are controlled by multiple factors, including…
We present a rotationally invariant viscous vertex model that accounts for both cortical and bulk dissipation of cells. The vanishing substrate-friction limit is enforced via Lagrange multipliers, which also provides a framework for…
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…
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…