Related papers: Electroactive differential growth and delayed inst…
Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of an electro-mechanical effect in many biological tissues and hydrogels, and its actual influence on growth, migration, and pattern formation. Here, to model these interactions and…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
Cell proliferation, apoptosis, and myosin-dependent contraction can generate elastic stress and strain in living tissues, which may be dissipated by internal rearrangement through cell topological transition and cytoskeletal reorganization.…
We describe the electrically enhanced growth of needle crystals from the vapor phase, for which there exists a morphological instability above a threshold applied potential. Our improved theoretical treatment of this phenomenon shows that…
During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…
Coordinated motion of cell monolayers during epithelial wound healing and tissue morphogenesis involves mechanical stress generation. Here we propose a model for the dynamics of epithelial expansion that couples mechanical deformations in…
Heterogeneous growth plays an important role in the shape and pattern formation of thin elastic structures ranging from the petals of blooming lilies to the cell walls of growing bacteria. Here we address the stability and regulation of…
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…
Mathematical models of biological growth commonly attempt to distinguish deformation due to growth from that due to mechanical stresses through a hypothesised multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient. Here we demonstrate…
Buckling instabilities driven by tissue growth underpin key developmental events such as the folding of the brain. Tissue growth is disordered due to cell-to-cell variability, but the effects of this variability on buckling are unknown.…
This paper presents an in-depth examination of the nonlinear deformation induced by dielectric actuation in pre-stressed ideal dielectric elastomers. A nonlinear ordinary differential equation that governs this deformation is formulated…
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…
Active semiflexible filaments are crucial in various biophysical processes, yet insights into their single-filament behavior have predominantly relied on theory and simulations, owing to the scarcity of controllable synthetic systems. Here,…
Growth-induced instabilities are ubiquitous in biological systems and lead to diverse morphologies in the form of wrinkling, folding, and creasing. The current work focusses on the mechanics behind growth-induced wrinkling instabilities in…
A rectangular plate of dielectric elastomer exhibiting gradients of material properties through its thickness will deform inhomogeneously when a potential difference is applied to compliant electrodes on its major surfaces, because each…
The mechanisms of stability or instability in the strained alloy film growth are of intense current interest to both theorists and experimentalists. We consider dislocation-free, coherent, growing alloy films which could exhibit a…
We analyse here the problem of large deformation of dielectric elastomeric membranes under coupled electromechanical loading. Extremely large deformations (enclosed volume changes of 100 times and greater) of a toroidal membrane are studied…
Surface growth is a crucial component of many natural and artificial processes from cell proliferation to additive manufacturing. In elastic systems surface growth is usually accompanied by the development of geometrical incompatibility…
Biological growth is often driven by mechanical cues, such as changes in external pressure or tensile loading. Moreover, it is well known that many living tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal stress, called the…
Biological cells embedded in fibrous matrices have been observed to form inter-cellular bands of dense and aligned fibers, through which they mechanically interact over long distances. Such matrix-mediated cellular interactions have been…