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Bundles of polymer filaments are responsible for the rich and unique mechanical behaviors of many biomaterials, including cells and extracellular matrices. In fibrin biopolymers, whose nonlinear elastic properties are crucial for normal…
Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…
Fiber suspensions flowing in structured media are encountered in many biological and industrial systems. Interactions between fibers and the transporting flow as well as fiber contact with obstacles can lead to complex dynamics. In this…
We study the self-assembly of colloidal microgel particles at a quasi-two-dimensional air-water interface of a drying droplet. Using bright-field microscopy, we demonstrate that increasing particle elasticity drives interfacial organization…
The human structural connectome has a complex internal community organization, characterized by a high degree of overlap and related to functional and cognitive phenomena. We explored connectivity properties in connectome networks and…
Intracellular protein patterns govern essential cellular functions by dynamically redistributing proteins between membrane-bound and cytosolic states, conserving their total numbers. This review presents a theoretical framework for…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
Adhering cells actively probe the mechanical properties of their environment and use the resulting information to position and orient themselves. We show that a large body of experimental observations can be consistently explained from one…
Unlike most synthetic materials, biological materials often stiffen as they are deformed. This nonlinear elastic response, critical for the physiological function of some tissues, has been documented since at least the 19th century, but the…
Living matter moves, deforms, and organizes itself. In cells this is made possible by networks of polymer filaments and crosslinking molecules that connect filaments to each other and that act as motors to do mechanical work on the network.…
Colloidal particles at complex fluid interfaces and within films assemble to form ordered structures with high degrees of symmetry via interactions that include capillarity, elasticity, and other fields like electrostatic charge. Here we…
Chirality manifests across multiple scales, yielding unique phenomena that break mirror symmetry. In chiral materials, unexpectedly large spin-filtering or photogalvanic effects have been observed even in materials composed of light…
The formation of self-organized patterns is key to the morphogenesis of multicellular organisms, although a comprehensive theory of biological pattern formation is still lacking. Here, we propose a minimal model combining tissue mechanics…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
We study the micromechanics of collagen-I gel with the goal of bridging the gap between theory and experiment in the study of biopolymer networks. Three-dimensional images of fluorescently labeled collagen are obtained by confocal…
A multiphasic constitutive model of the skin that implicitly accounts for the process of intrinsic (i.e.\ chronological) ageing via variation of the constitutive parameters is proposed. The structurally-motivated constitutive formulation…
We experimentally investigate the structural behavior of an interacting colloidal monolayer being driven across a decagonal quasiperiodic potential landscape created by an optical interference pattern. When the direction of the driving…
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…
The interplay between cytoskeletal architecture and the nonlinearity of the interactions due to bucklable filaments plays a key role in modulating the cell's mechanical stability and affecting its structural rearrangements. We study a model…