Related papers: Actuation of Cell Sheets in 3D
Nematic elastomers with a locked-in anisotropy direction exhibit semi-soft elastic response characterized by a plateau in the stress-strain curve in which stress does not change with strain. We calculate the global phase diagram for a…
How does growth encode form in developing organisms? Many different spatiotemporal growth profiles may sculpt tissues into the same target 3D shapes, but only specific growth patterns are observed in animal and plant development. In…
Open-cell graphitic foams were fabricated by chemical vapor deposition using nickel templates and their compressive responses were measured over a range of relative densities. The mechanical response required an interpretation in terms of a…
Liquid crystal elastomers contract along their director on heating and recover on cooling, offering great potential as actuators and artificial muscles. If a flat sheet is programmed with a spatially varying director pattern, it will…
The maintenance of tissue and organ structures during dynamic homeostasis is often not well understood. In order for a system to be stable, cell renewal, cell migration and cell death must be finely balanced. Moreover, a tissue's shape must…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Cell-cell contacts in tissues are continuously subject to mechanical forces due to homeostatic pressure and active cytoskeleton dynamics. While much is known about the molecular pathways of adhesion, the role of mechanics is less well…
Mechanical forces such as fluid shear have been shown to enhance cell growth and differentiation, but knowledge of their mechanistic effect on cells is limited because the local flow patterns and associated metrics are not precisely known.…
In nature interactions between biopolymers and motor proteins give rise to biologically essential emergent behaviours. Besides cytoskeleton mechanics, active nematics arise from such interactions. Here we present a study on 3D active…
We develop a continuum theory to describe the collective dynamics of deformable epithelial cells, using two tensor order parameters to distinguish the force-generating active filaments in the cells from their shape. The theory demonstrates…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
The organization of live cells to tissues is associated with the mechanical interaction between cells, which is mediated through their elastic environment. We model cells as spherical active force dipoles surrounded by an infinite elastic…
Intelligent biological systems are characterized by their embodiment in a complex environment and the intimate interplay between their nervous systems and the nonlinear mechanical properties of their bodies. This coordination, in which the…
The organization of cells within tissues plays a vital role in various biological processes, including development and morphogenesis. As a result, understanding how cells self-organize in tissues has been an active area of research. In our…
Mechanically active cells in soft media act as force dipoles. The resulting elastic interactions are long-ranged and favor the formation of strings. We show analytically that due to screening, the effective interaction between strings…
In this paper, we present a 2D numerical model developed to simulate the dynamics of soft, deformable particles. To accommodate significant particle deformations, the particle surface is represented as a narrow shell composed of mass points…
In this article, we propose a general framework to study the dynamics and topology of cellular networks that capture the geometry of cell packings in two-dimensional tissues. Such epithelia undergo large-scale deformation during…
For the first time the phenomenon of cellular structure coarsening are consistently analysed from the positions of kinetic, hydrodynamic and stochastodynamic theories of nonequilibrium statistical systems. Thereby micro-, meso- and…