Related papers: Soft matter mechanics of immune cell aggregates

The formation and proliferation of protein aggregates play a central role in a number of devastating neuro-degenerative diseases. Many experimental studies indicate that the ability of existing aggregates to replicate is a key property in…

The mechanisms by which organs acquire their functional structure and realize its maintenance (or homeostasis) over time are still largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate this question on adipose tissue. Adipose tissue can represent…

Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…

Lipid membranes form the barrier between the inside and outside of cells and many of their subcompartments. As such, they bind to a wide variety of nano- and micrometer sized objects and, in the presence of strong adhesive forces, strongly…

Supported lipid membranes are useful and important model systems for studying cell membrane properties and membrane mediated processes. One attractive application of supported membranes is the design of phantom cells exhibiting well defined…

We analyse a minimal model for the primary response in the adaptive immune system comprising three different players: antigens, T and B cells. We assume B-T interactions to be diluted and sampled locally from heterogeneous degree…

We study, by means of mean field calculations and Monte Carlo simulations of a lattice-gas model, the distribution of adhesion sites of a bilayer membrane and a supporting flat surface. Our model accounts for the many-body character of the…

In tissue development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, coordinated cell motion arises from active forces produced by the cells. The relationship between force and motion remains unclear, however, because the forces result from a sum of…

Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…

Multicellular aggregates are known to exhibit liquid-like properties. The fusion process of two cell aggregates is commonly studied as the coalescence of two viscous drops. However, tissues are complex materials and can exhibit viscoelastic…

We present a probabilistic T-cell model that includes negative selection and takes contrasting models of tissue-restricted antigen (TRA) expression in the thymus into account. We start from the basic model of van den Berg, Rand, and…

Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…

In this review we summarize theoretical progress in the field of active matter, placing it in the context of recent experiments. Our approach offers a unified framework for the mechanical and statistical properties of living matter:…

The study of organoids, artificially grown cell aggregates with the functionality and small-scale anatomy of real organs, is one of the most active areas of research in biology and biophysics, yet the basic physical origins of their…

The measurement of cellular traction forces on soft elastic substrates has become a standard tool for many labs working on mechanobiology. Here we review the basic principles and different variants of this approach. In general, the…

Many soft biological tissues possess a considerable surface stress, which plays a significant role in their biophysical functions, but most previous methods for characterizing their mechanical properties have neglected the effects of…

Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…

A stochastic model for the activation of T-cells is analysed. T-cells are part of the immune system and recognize foreign antigens against a background of the body's own molecules. The model under consideration is a slight generalization of…

T lymphocytes (T cells) orchestrate adaptive immune responses upon activation. T cell activation requires sufficiently strong binding of T cell receptors (TCRs) on their surface to short peptides (p) derived from foreign proteins, which are…

Cell membranes interact via anchored receptor and ligand molecules. Central questions on cell adhesion concern the binding affinity of these membrane-anchored molecules, the mechanisms leading to the receptor-ligand domains observed during…