Related papers: Modelling bulk mechanical effects in a planar cell…
How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solid-like to a fluid-like state or vice versa. Here, we introduce a new way for…
During the early-stages of embryo development, morphogenesis--- the emergence of shape and form in living organisms--- is almost exclusively associated with monolayers of tightly bound epithelial cells. To understand how such tissues change…
Disordered solids often change their elastic response as they slowly age. Using experiments and simulations, we study how aging disordered planar networks under an applied stress affects their nonlinear elastic response. We are able to…
Collective behaviors in cellular systems are regulated not only by biochemical signalling pathways but also by intercellular mechanical forces, whose quantification in contractile monolayers remains poorly understood. Here, by integrating…
Wrinkling of an inextensible elastic lining of an inner-lined tube under imposed pressure is considered. A simple equation modeling the elastic properties of the lining, the pressure, and the soft-substrate forces is derived. This equation…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
We propose and study a simplified model for the surface and bulk structures of crosslinked polymer gels, into which voids are introduced through templating by surfactant micelles. Such systems were recently studied by Atomic Force…
Morphogenesis involves complex shape changes of biological tissues. Yet, tissue shape changes depend on tissue rheology, which in turn arises from the interplay of large numbers of cells. Here, we link cell- and tissue-scale mechanics by…
We investigate the effect of annealed disorder on the mechanical properties and plasticity of a modeled amorphous solid by introducing a small fraction of heavy impurities into the material which resembles real experimental systems. The…
We perform cell segmentation on images from experimental studies of confluent, mobile cells in epithelial monolayers and show that these systems possess a broad, positively-skewed shape parameter distribution $P(\mathcal{A})$, where…
We compute the electronic structure of two-dimensional (2D) materials decorated with self-assembled organic monolayers using density functional theory. We find that 2D materials are strongly impacted by near-field electrostatic effects…
We formulate a simple effective model to describe molecular interactions in a lipid monolayer. The model represents lipid molecules in terms of two-dimensional anisotropic particles on the plane of the monolayer. These particles interact…
Models of tissue growth are now well established, in particular in relation to their applications to cancer. They describe the dynamics of cells subject to motion resulting from a pressure gradient generated by the death and birth of cells,…
We investigate the structural properties of a two-dimensional system of ellipsoidal particles carrying a linear quadrupole moment in their center. These particles represent a simple model for a variety of uncharged, non-polar conjugated…
Collective cell motility plays central roles in various biological phenomena such as inflammatory response, wound healing, cancer metastasis and embryogenesis. These are biological demonstrations of the unjamming transition. However,…
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…
We study cosmological consequences of non-constant brane world moduli in five dimensional brane world models with bulk scalars and two boundary branes. We focus on the case where the brane tension is an exponential function of the bulk…
Control of cell proliferation is a fundamental aspect of tissue physiology central to morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer. Although many of the molecular genetic factors are now known, the system level regulation of growth is still…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…