Related papers: Active Intracellular Mechanics: A Key to Cellular …
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
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…
During embryonic development, regeneration and homeostasis, cells have to physically integrate into their target tissues, where they ultimately execute their function. Despite a significant body of research on how mechanical forces instruct…
Biological membranes and vesicles play a central role in living systems, forming dynamic interfaces that regulate cellular organization and function. Classical descriptions of membrane mechanics that are rooted in equilibrium statistical…
Cells are strongly out-of-equilibrium systems driven by continuous energy supply. They carry out many vital functions requiring active transport of various ingredients and organelles, some being small, others being large. The cytoskeleton,…
Cell cell and cell matrix adhesions are fundamental in all multicellular organisms. They play a key role in cellular growth, differentiation, pattern formation and migration. Cell-cell adhesion is substantial in the immune response,…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…
Active diffusion of intracellular components is emerging as an important process in cell biology. This process is mediated by complex assemblies of molecular motors and cytoskeletal filaments that drive force generation in the cytoplasm and…
Mechanics and biochemical signaling are both often deregulated in cancer, leading to cancer cell phenotypes that exhibit increased invasiveness, proliferation, and survival. The dynamics and interactions of cytoskeletal components control…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
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…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…
The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility. It mainly focuses…
A study is made of how active membrane proteins can modify the long wavelength mechanics of fluid membranes. The activity of the proteins is modelled as disturbing the protein surroundings through non-local force distributions of which a…
The actin cortex is a thin layer of actin, myosin, and actin binding proteins that underlies the membrane of most animal cells. It is highly dynamic and can undergo remodelling on time-scales of tens of seconds thanks to protein turnover…
Mechanobiology is gaining more and more traction as the fundamental role of physical forces in biological function becomes clearer. Forces at the microscale are often measured indirectly using inverse problems such as Traction Force…
Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…
In view of ever-changing conditions both in the external world and in intrinsic brain states, maintaining the robustness of computations poses a challenge, adequate solutions to which we are only beginning to understand. At the level of…