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The rheology of biological tissue plays an important role in many processes, from organ formation to cancer invasion. Here, we use a multi-phase field model of motile cells to simulate active microrheology within a tissue monolayer. When…

Convergence extension, the simultaneous elongation of tissue along one axis while narrowing along a perpendicular axis, occurs during embryonic development. A fundamental process that contributes to shaping the organism, it happens in many…

Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…

Biofilms, bacteria cells surrounded by a self-produced polymeric matrix, are common on medical devices and lead to many hospital infections. The biofilm lifecycle includes disassembly and dispersion, where bacteria clusters detach from the…

We review continuum elastic models for the transmission of both external forces and internal active cellular forces in biopolymer gels, and relate them to recent experiments. Rather than being exhaustive, we focus on continuum elastic…

A mathematical model is proposed for shape evolution and locomotion of fish epidermal keratocytes on elastic substrates. The model is based on mechanosensing concepts: cells apply contractile forces onto the elastic substrate, while cell…

A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier that they…

Maintenance of epidermal thickness is critical to the barrier function of the skin. Decreased tissue thickness, specifically in the stratum corneum (the outermost layer of the tissue), causes discomfort and inflammation, and is related to…

Many critical biological processes, like wound healing, require confluent cell monolayers/bulk tissues to transition from a jammed solid-like to a fluid-like state. Although numerical studies anticipate changes in the cell shape alone can…

Microgels are soft colloidal particles constituted by cross-linked polymer networks with a high potential for applications. In particular, after adsorption at a fluid interface, interfacial tension provides two-dimensional (2D) confinement…

Optimal characterization of the mechanical properties of both cells and their surrounding is an issue of major interest. Indeed, cell function and development are strongly influenced by external stimuli. Furthermore, a change in cell…

Cellular microrheology has shown that cancer cells with high metastatic potential are softer compared to non-tumorigenic normal cells. These findings rely on measuring the apparent Young modulus of whole cells using primarily atomic force…

Many biological tissues are viscoelastic, behaving as elastic solids on short timescales and fluids on long timescales. This collective mechanical behavior enables and helps to guide pattern formation and tissue layering. Here we…

Epithelial cells can assemble into cohesive colonies and collectively interact with substrates by generating extracellular forces through focal adhesions. Recently, a molecularly based thermodynamic model, which integrates both the…

Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…

Inspired by active shape morphing in developing tissues and biomaterials, we investigate two generic mechanochemical models where the deformations of a thin elastic sheet are driven by, and in turn affect, the concentration gradients of a…

The motion of cells in tissues is an ubiquitous phenomenon. In particular, in monolayered cell colonies in vitro, pronounced collective behavior with swirl-like motion has been observed deep within a cell colony, while at the same time, the…

Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…

Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…

Non-equilibrium and active effects in mesoscopic scale systems have heralded a new era of scientific inquiries, whether concerning meta-materials or biological systems such as bacteria and cellular components. At mesoscopic scales,…