Related papers: Active Intracellular Mechanics: A Key to Cellular …
Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…
The rheology of biological cells is not only determined by their cytoskeletal networks, but also by the molecular motors that crosslink and contract them. Recently it has been found that the assemblies of myosin II molecular motors in…
Cell-cell adhesion plays a vital role in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. One of its functions is regulation of cell migration, such as occurs, e.g. during embryogenesis or in cancer. In this work, we develop a…
A structural relationship between the centrosome and cytoskeleton has been recognized for many years. Centrosomes typically reside near the nucleus, establishing and maintaining the nucleus-centrosome axis. This spatial arrangement is…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
There are many processes in biology in which mechanical forces are generated. Force-bearing networks can transduce locally developed mechanical signals very extensively over different parts of the cell or tissues. In this article we conduct…
Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions such as proliferation, motility, and cell death, and such cellular systems are…
Mechanical forces influence the dynamics of growing tissues. Computer simulations are employed to study the importance of interfacial effects in tissue competition. It was speculated that mechanical pressure determines the competition,…
Active contributions to fluctuations are a direct consequence of metabolic energy consumption in living cells. Such metabolic processes continuously create active forces, which deform the membrane to control motility, proliferation as well…
Understanding the mechanisms of interactions within cells, tissues, and organisms is crucial to driving developments across biology and medicine. Mathematical modeling is an essential tool for simulating biological systems and revealing…
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…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Collective behaviors in cellular systems are regulated not only by biochemical signalling pathways but also by intercellular mechanical forces, whose quantification in contractile monolayers remains poorly understood. Here, by integrating…
Immune cells recognize and discriminate antigens through immunological synapses - dynamic intercellular junctions exhibiting highly organized receptor-ligand patterns. While much work has focused on molecular kinetics and passive mechanisms…
Tuning of active prestress e.g. through activity of molecular motors constitutes a powerful cellular tool to adjust cellular stiffness through nonlinear material properties. Understanding this tool is an important prerequisite for our…
Amoeboid motion is a dynamic mode of cell motility essential for processes such as the immune response and wound healing. This review examines recent developments in the mathematical and computational modeling of amoeboid crawling, focusing…
Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
Adhering cells actively probe the mechanical properties of their environment and use the resulting information to position and orient themselves. We show that a large body of experimental observations can be consistently explained from one…