Related papers: Soft matter mechanics of immune cell aggregates
Living cells adapt and respond actively to the mechanical properties of their environment. In addition to biochemical mechanotransduction, evidence exists for a myosin-dependent, purely mechanical sensitivity to the stiffness of the…
Cell-cell adhesion plays a vital role in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. One of its functions is regulation of cell migration, such as occurs, e.g. during embryogenesis or in cancer. In this work, we develop a…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…
Living cells establish long-range orientational order through collective alignment, giving rise to topological defects whose functional relevance is increasingly recognized in tissue organization and morphogenesis. Engineered topographical…
The aim of this paper is to study the qualitative behaviour predicted by a mathematical model for the initial stage of T cell activation. The state variables in the model are the concentrations of phosphorylation states of the T cell…
Nascent adhesions are submicron transient structures promoting the early adhesion of cells to the extracellular matrix. Nascent adhesions typically consist of several tens of integrins, and serve as platforms for the recruitment and…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells generates forces in conjunction with myosin motor proteins to directly and indirectly drive essential cellular processes. The semiflexible filaments of the cytoskeleton can respond nonlinearly to the…
The adaptive immune system is a natural diagnostic and therapeutic. It recognizes threats earlier than clinical symptoms manifest and neutralizes antigen with exquisite specificity. Recognition specificity and broad reactivity is enabled…
Clustering of molecules on biological membranes is a widely observed phenomenon. In some cases, such as the clustering of Ras proteins on the membranes of mammalian cells, proper cell signaling is critically dependent on the maintenance of…
Tissue cells are in a state of permanent mechanical tension that is maintained mainly by myosin II minifilaments, which are bipolar assemblies of tens of myosin II molecular motors contracting actin networks and bundles. Here we introduce a…
Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behavior of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this…
Small magnetic particles placed in a relatively soft polymer (with elastic modulus E ~ 10-100 kPa) are magnetically soft elastomers. The external magnetic field acts on each particle which leads to microscopic deformation of the material…
Self-assembly and force generation are two central processes in biological systems that usually are considered in separation. However, the signals that activate non-muscle myosin II molecular motors simultaneously lead to self-assembly into…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
We are interested in modeling theoretical immunology within a statistical mechanics flavor: focusing on the antigen-independent maturation process of B-cells, in this paper we try to revise the problem of self vs non-self discrimination by…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
The immune system recognizes a myriad of invading pathogens and their toxic products. It does so with a finite repertoire of antibodies and T cell receptors. We here describe theories that quantify the immune system dynamics. We describe…
Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…
The present work presents a density-functional microscopic model of soft biological tissue. The model was based on a prototype molecular structure from experimentally resolved collagen peptide residues and water clusters and has the…