Related papers: Influence of boundary geometry on active patterns

Contractile actomyosin network flows are crucial for many cellular processes including cell division and motility, morphogenesis and transport. How local remodeling of actin architecture tunes stress production and dissipation and regulates…

Recent experimental studies have shown that confinement can profoundly affect self-organization in semi-dilute active suspensions, leading to striking features such as the formation of steady and spontaneous vortices in circular domains and…

Rigidity transitions in simple models of confluent cells have been a powerful organizing principle in understanding the dynamics and mechanics of dense biological tissue. In this work we explore the interplay between geometry and rigidity…

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…

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.…

Stress generation by the actin cytoskeleton shapes cells and tissues. Despite impressive progress in live imaging and quantitative physical descriptions of cytoskeletal network dynamics, the connection between processes at molecular scales…

While cell crawling on a solid surface is relatively well understood, and relies on substrate adhesion, some cells can also swim in the bulk, through mechanisms that are still largely unclear. Here, we propose a minimal model for in-bulk…

This paper studies a bulk-surface reaction-diffusion system for cell polarization in two-dimensional domains. The model describes the formation of localized patterns through the wave-pinning mechanism, while explicitly incorporating the…

Developing tissues need to pattern themselves in space and time. A prevalent mechanism to achieve this are pulsatile active stresses generated by the actin cytoskeleton. Active gel theory is a powerful tool to model the dynamics of…

Inspired by recent experiments of cells accumulating on anisotropic substrates, we study a two-dimensional, compressible, isotropic, active fluid in the presence of anisotropic friction. We find that regions of anisotropic friction that are…

We study a minimal model of a crawling eukaryotic cell with a chemical polarity controlled by a reaction-diffusion mechanism describing Rho GTPase dynamics. The size, shape, and speed of the cell emerge from the combination of the chemical…

The Ekman boundary layer is a fundamental concept in fluid dynamics that describes fluid motion near boundaries affected by Earth's rotation. Most theoretical studies have simplified their analysis by assuming a planar boundary surface,…

Pattern formation and the mechanics of a mixture of actin filaments and myosin motors that is confined by a rigid membrane is investigated. By using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics model, we demonstrate that the competition between the…

Geometrical cues are known to play a very important role in neuronal growth and the formation of neuronal networks. Here, we present a detailed analysis of axonal growth and dynamics for neuronal cells cultured on patterned…

Oscillatory behaviour in force-generating systems is a pervasive phenomenon in cell biology. In this work, we investigate how oscillations in the actomyosin cytoskeleton drive cell shape changes during the process of Dorsal Closure, a…

Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…

We investigate a continuum mechanical model for an adherent cell on two dimensional adhesive micropatterned substrates. The cell is modeled as an isotropic and homogeneous elastic material subject to uniform internal contractile stresses.…

We present a general dynamical theory of a membrane coupled to an actin cortex containing polymerizing filaments with active stresses and currents, and demonstrate that active membrane dynamics [Phys. Rev. Lett \textbf{84}, 3494 (2000)] and…

Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…

Stress fibers are contractile actomyosin bundles commonly observed in the cytoskeleton of metazoan cells. The spatial profile of the polarity of actin filaments inside contractile actomyosin bundles is either monotonic (graded) or periodic…