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During embryonic morphogenesis, tissues undergo dramatic deformations in order to form functional organs. Similarly, in adult animals, living cells and tissues are continually subjected to forces and deformations. Therefore, the success of…
Surface tension governed by differential adhesion can drive fluid particle mixtures to sort into separate regions, i.e., demix. Does the same phenomenon occur in confluent biological tissues? We begin to answer this question for epithelial…
Synchronization of activity among myocytes constituting vital organs, e.g., the heart, is crucial for physiological functions. Self-organized coordination in such heterogeneous ensemble of excitable and oscillatory cells is therefore of…
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
Rhythmic and sequential segmentation of the embryonic body plan is a vital developmental patterning process in all vertebrate species. However, a theoretical framework capturing the emergence of dynamic patterns of gene expression from the…
Different cell types aggregate and sort into hierarchical architectures during the formation of animal tissues. The resulting spatial organization depends (in part) on the strength of adhesion of one cell type to itself relative to other…
Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…
How do mammalian cells that share the same genome exist in notably distinct phenotypes, exhibiting differences in morphology, gene expression patterns, and epigenetic chromatin statuses? Furthermore how do cells of different phenotypes…
Segregation of different cell types is a crucial process for the pattern formation in tissues, in particular during embryogenesis. Since the involved cell interactions are complex and difficult to measure individually in experiments,…
Emergence of regular spatial patterns is a hallmark in living matter ranging from subcellular organelles to developing embryos and to ecosystems. Mechanisms for the formation of ordered spatial patterns in biology often require chemical…
Spatial heterogeneity is a hallmark of living systems, even at the molecular scale in individual cells. A key example is the partitioning of membrane-bound proteins via lipid domain formation or cytoskeleton-induced corralling. Yet the…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
The rheological properties of biological tissues are core to processes such as cancer metastasis, wound healing and embryo development. The emergence of tissue and organ structures during morphogenesis requires the precise formation of…
The proper functioning of multicellular organisms requires the robust establishment of precise proportions between distinct cell-types. This developmental differentiation process typically involves intracellular regulatory and stochastic…
Successful biological development via spatial regulation of cell differentiation relies on action of multiple signaling molecules that are known as morphogens. It is now well established that signaling molecules create non-uniform…
During the development of an organism, cells must coordinate and organize to generate the correct shape, structure, and spatial patterns of tissues and organs, a process known as morphogenesis. The morphogenesis of embryonic tissues is…
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…
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…
Gradual transformation of the epidermal stem cells to corneocytes involves a chain of chronologically well-arranged events that mostly stimulated locally by their neighbors. Cell diversity that observed during the differentiation through…
Through mechanical forces, biological cells remodel the surrounding collagen network, generating striking deformation patterns. Tethers-tracts of high densification and fiber alignment-form between cells, thinner bands emanate from cell…