Related papers: Soft matter mechanics of immune cell aggregates

Tissue Engineering concerns the three-dimensional cell growth so that bio-artificial tissues could be created and used for transplantation. The recently expressed concerns from the Tissue Engineering research community for a re-direction of…

Protein aggregation is of particular interest due to its connection with many diseases and disorders. Many factors can alter the dynamics and result of this process, one of them being the diffusivity of the monomers and aggregates in the…

The role of T-cells within the immune system is to confirm and assess anomalous situations and then either respond to or tolerate the source of the effect. To illustrate how these mechanisms can be harnessed to solve real-world problems, we…

T cells orchestrate adaptive immune responses upon activation. T cell activation requires sufficiently strong binding of T cell receptors on their surface to short peptides derived from foreign proteins bound to protein products of the…

We generated a computational approach to analyze the biomechanics of epithelial cell aggregates, either island or stripes or entire monolayers, that combines both vertex and contact-inhibition-of-locomotion models to include both cell-cell…

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…

Cell-cell adhesion is established by specific binding of receptor and ligand proteins. The adhesion bonds attract each other and often aggregate into large clusters that are central to many biological processes. One possible origin of…

A quantitative understanding of how cells interact with their extracellular matrix via molecular bonds is fundamental for many important processes in cell biology and engineering. In these interactions, the deformability of cells and matrix…

How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…

Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…

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,…

Biological tissues exhibit complex behaviors with their dynamics often resembling inert soft matter such as liquids, polymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. These analogies enable physics-based approaches for investigations of emergent…

An essential feature of the adaptive immune system is the proliferation of antigen-specific lymphocytes during an immune reaction to form a large pool of effector cells. This proliferation must be regulated to ensure an effective response…

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.…

Cellular aggregates play a significant role in the evolution of biological systems such as tumor growth, tissue spreading, wound healing, and biofilm formation. Analysis of such biological systems, in principle, includes examining the…

Cell adhesion proteins are transmembrane proteins that bind cells to their environment. These proteins typically cluster into disk-shaped or linear structures. Here we show that such clustering patterns spontaneously emerge when the protein…

Self-assembly in natural and synthetic molecular systems can create complex aggregates or materials whose properties and functionality rises from their internal structure and molecular arrangement. The key microscopic features that control…

In previous work, we studied host response to a pathogen which uses a cycle of immunologically distinct stages to establish and maintain infection. We showed that for generic parameter values, the system has a unique biologically meaningful…

In this work we adopt a statistical mechanics approach to investigate basic, systemic features exhibited by adaptive immune systems. The lymphocyte network made by B-cells and T-cells is modeled by a bipartite spin-glass, where, following…

Effective recognition of foreign antigens by the adaptive immune system relies on T cells being activated by antigen-presenting cells (APCs) in lymph nodes. Here, diffusing T cells may encounter cognate APCs that present matching antigen…