Related papers: Controlling the morphologies and dynamics in three…
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…
A fundamental question in biology is to understand how patterns and shapes emerge from the collective interplay of large numbers of cells. Cells forming two-dimensional epithelial tissues behave as active materials that undergo remodeling…
The reaction-diffusion models have been extensively applied to explain the mechanism of pattern formations in early embryogenesis based on geometrically confined microtissues consisting of human pluripotent stem cells. Recently, mechanical…
The fragility, that controls the temperature-dependent viscous properties of liquids as the glass transition is approached, in various glass-forming liquids with different atomic interactions and densities is investigated by molecular…
Collective cell migration is a highly regulated process involved in wound healing, cancer metastasis and morphogenesis. Mechanical interactions among cells provide an important regulatory mechanism to coordinate such collective motion.…
We present a hydrodynamic theory to describe shear flows in developing epithelial tissues. We introduce hydrodynamic fields corresponding to state properties of constituent cells as well as a contribution to overall tissue shear flow due to…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
The alignment of fibers and cells in living tissues affect their mechanical properties and functionality. In this context, one can draw an analogy between tissues and nematic liquid crystal elastomers. We explore this analogy by growing…
Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
Cells are able to generate phenotypic diversity both during development and in response to stressful and changing environments, aiding survival. The biologically and medically vital process of a cell assuming a functionally important fate…
The mechanics of crawling cells on a substrate is investigated by using a minimal model that satisfies the force-free condition. A cell is described by two subcellular elements connected by a linear actuator that changes the length of the…
We study the influence of cell-level mechanical heterogeneity in epithelial tissues using a vertex-based model. Heterogeneity in single cell stiffness is introduced as a quenched random variable in the preferred shape index($p_0$) for each…
Cell neighbor exchanges play a critical role in regulating tissue fluidity during epithelial morphogenesis and repair. In vivo, these neighbor exchanges are often hindered by the formation of transiently stable four-fold vertices, which can…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
The migratory dynamics of cells in physiological processes, ranging from wound healing to cancer metastasis, rely on contact-mediated cell-cell interactions. These interactions play a key role in shaping the stochastic trajectories of…
We numerically elucidate the microscopic mechanisms controlling the relaxation dynamics of a three-dimensional lattice glass model that has static properties compatible with the approach to a random first-order transition. At low…