Related papers: Cell size heterogeneity controls crystallization o…
During organismal development, biochemical reaction networks sense and respond to mechanical forces to coordinate embryonic patterning with embryo morphogenesis. Factors such as cortical tension, cell density, and matrix mechanical…
Amorphous materials exhibit complex material proprteties with strongly nonlinear behaviors. Below a yield stress they behave as plastic solids, while they start to yield above a critical stress $\Sigma_c$. A key quantity controlling…
Cell sorting, whereby a heterogeneous cell mixture segregates and forms distinct homogeneous tissues, is one of the main collective cell behaviors at work during development. Although differences in interfacial energies are recognized to be…
Convergent extension of epithelial tissue is a key motif of animal morphogenesis. On a coarse scale, cell motion resembles laminar fluid flow; yet in contrast to a fluid, epithelial cells adhere to each other and maintain the tissue layer…
During developmental processes such as embryogenesis, how a group of cells fold into specific structures, is a central question in biology that defines how living organisms form. Establishing tissue-level morphology critically relies on how…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
The fast blood stream of animals is associated with large shear stresses. Consequently, blood cells have evolved a special morphology and a specific internal architecture allowing them to maintain their integrity over several weeks. For…
Fundamental mechanisms governing cell size control and homeostasis are still poorly understood. The relationship between sizes at division and birth in single cells is used as a metric to categorize the basis of size homeostasis [1-3].…
A central question in developmental biology is how size and position are determined. The genetic code carries instructions on how to control these properties in order to regulate the pattern and morphology of structures in the developing…
Bacterial cellulose is an important class of biomaterials which can be grown in well-controlled laboratory and industrial conditions. The cellulose structure is affected by several biological, chemical and environmental factors, including…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
The motion of a eukaryotic cell presents a variety of interesting and challenging problems from both a modeling and a computational perspective. The processes span many spatial scales (from molecular to tissue) as well as disparate time…
Most microorganisms regulate their cell size. We review here some of the mathematical formulations of the problem of cell size regulation. We focus on coarse-grained stochastic models and the statistics they generate. We review the…
Recent experiments suggest that the interplay between cells and the mechanics of their substrate gives rise to a diversity of morphological and migrational behaviors. Here, we develop a Cellular Potts Model of polarizing cells on a…
Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell…
The vertex model of epithelia describes the apical surface of a tissue as a tiling of polygonal cells, with a mechanical energy governed by deviations in cell shape from preferred, or target, area, $A_0$, and perimeter, $P_0$. The model…
Our knowledge of how individual cells self-organize to form complex multicellular systems is being revolutionized by a data outburst, coming from high-throughput experimental breakthroughs such as single-cell RNA sequencing and spatially…
Various rod-shaped bacteria such as the canonical gram negative Escherichia coli or the well-studied gram positive Bacillus subtilis divide symmetrically after they approximately double their volume. Their size at division is not constant,…
Cell shape is fundamental in biology. The average cell shape can influence crucial biological functions, such as cell fate and division orientation. But cell-to-cell shape variability is often regarded as noise. In contrast, recent works…
The dynamics of dense particle packings near the jamming transition is characterized by correlated particle motion. The growth of dynamical heterogeneities, or strong spatial variations in the motion of the particles constituting the…