Related papers: Soft matter mechanics of immune cell aggregates
The down regulation of CD3 protein present on the surface of a T-cell triggers the process of activation. A rapid decrease of CD3 from the surface is required to reach the threshold that is necessary for the continuation of the activation…
Inspired by motile cells in tissue formation, we find that active systems of self-aligning adhesive particles undergo ballistic aggregation through a flocking transition. This kinetic regime emerges when the cluster persistence length grows…
There is compelling evidence that substrate stiffness affects cell adhesion as well as cytoskeleton organization and contractile activity. This work was designed to study the cytoskeletal contractile activity of cells plated on microposts…
Repertoire-level analysis of T cell receptors offers a biologically grounded signal for disease detection and immune monitoring, yet practical deployment is impeded by label sparsity, cohort heterogeneity, and the computational burden of…
Interaction of electric fields with biological cells is indispensable for many physiological processes. Thermal electrical noise in the cellular environment has long been considered as the minimum threshold for detection of electrical…
The persistent motility of the individual constituents in microbial suspensions represents a prime example of so-called active matter systems. Cells consume energy, exert forces and move, overall releasing the constraints of equilibrium…
J-aggregates are a class of low-dimensional molecular crystals which display enhanced interaction with light. These systems show interesting optical properties as an intense and narrow red-shifted absorption peak (J-band) with respect to…
Cytotoxic T lymphocytes (T) and natural killer (NK) cells are the main cytotoxic killer cells of the human body to eliminate pathogen-infected or tumorigenic cells (i.e. target cells). Once a NK or T cell has identified a target cell, they…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
Sensors are the first element of the pathways that control the response of cells to their environment. After chemical, the next most important cue is mechanical, and protein complexes that produce or enable a chemical signal in response to…
We study impulse response in 1-D homogeneous micro-granular chains on a linear elastic substrate. Micro-granular interactions are analytically described by the Schwarz contact model which includes nonlinear compressive as well as…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
We investigate clustering of malignant glioma cells. \emph{In vitro} experiments in collagen gels identified a cell line that formed clusters in a region of low cell density, whereas a very similar cell line (which lacks an important…
Mechanosensitive channels are ion channels activated by membrane tension. We investigate the influence of bacterial mechanosensitive channels spatial distribution on activation (gating). Based on elastic short-range interactions we map this…
While mechanobiology has demonstrated that precise control over mechanical properties at the whole-cell level is crucial for many biological functions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the intracellular mechanical properties.…
The human adaptive immune response is known to weaken in advanced age, resulting in increased severity of pathogen-born illness, poor vaccine efficacy, and a higher prevalence of cancer in the elderly. Age-related erosion of the T-cell…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
It is known that mechanical interactions couple a cell to its neighbors, enabling a feedback loop to regulate tissue growth. However, the interplay between cell-cell adhesion strength, local cell density and force fluctuations in regulating…
Recent experimental studies have suggested the ratio between T-helper and T-suppressor lymphocytes as an index of immunosuppression in HIV, cancer, immunosenescence and inflammatory and auto-immune diseases. However, a quantitative…