Related papers: Collective migration and topological phase transit…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…
We use computer simulations to study the microscopic dynamics of an athermal assembly of soft particles near the fluid-to-solid, jamming transition. Borrowing tools developed to study dynamic heterogeneity near glass transitions, we…
Collective cell migration in 3D extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes. Migrating cells can generate active pulling forces via actin filament contraction, which are transmitted to the ECM…
A fundamental feature of collective cell migration is phenotypic heterogeneity which, for example, influences tumour progression and relapse. While current mathematical models often consider discrete phenotypic structuring of the cell…
Complex tissue flows in epithelia are driven by intra- and inter-cellular processes that generate, maintain, and coordinate mechanical forces. There has been growing evidence that cell shape anisotropy, manifested as nematic order, plays an…
Recent work on particle-based models of tissues has suggested that any finite rate of cell division and cell death is sufficient to fluidize an epithelial tissue. At the same time, experimental evidence has indicated the existence of glassy…
Topological defects are fundamental to the collective dynamics of non-equilibrium systems and in active matter, mediating spontaneous flows, dynamic self-organization, and emergent pattern formation. Here, we reveal critical states in…
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…
Epithelial tissues form physically integrated barriers against the external environment protecting organs from infection and invasion. Within each tissue, epithelial cells respond to different challenges that can potentially compromise…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
Migration of cells can be characterized by two, prototypical types of motion: individual and collective migration. We propose a statistical-inference approach designed to detect the presence of cell-cell interactions that give rise to…
As phenomena that necessarily emerge from the collective behavior of interacting particles, phase transitions continue to be difficult to predict using statistical thermodynamics. A recent proposal called the topological hypothesis suggests…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
Epithelial cell clusters often move collectively on a substrate. Mechanical signals play a major role in organizing this behavior. There are a number of experimental observations in these systems which await a comprehensive explanation.…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
Consider growing a network, in which every new connection is made between two disconnected nodes. At least one node is chosen randomly from a subset consisting of $g$ fraction of the entire population in the smallest clusters. Here we show…
Cellular decision making allows cells to assume functionally different phenotypes in response to microenvironmental cues, without genetic change. It is an open question, how individual cell decisions influence the dynamics at the tissue…
The self-organised motion of vast numbers of creatures in a single direction is a spectacular example of emergent order. We recreate this phenomenon using actuated non-living components. We report here that millimetre-sized tapered rods,…
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…