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Cell migration is important in many biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly constrained by its neighbors, leading to glassy dynamics.…
Capillary forces acting at the surface of a liquid drop can be strong enough to deform small objects and recent studies have provided several examples of elastic instabilities induced by surface tension. We present such an example where a…
Many biological, culinary, and engineering processes lead to the co-encapsulation of several soft particles within a liquid interface. In these situations the particles are bound together by the capillary forces that deform them and…
The elastic moduli of tissues are connected to their states of health and function. The epithelial monolayer is a simple, minimal, tissue model that is often used to gain understanding of mechanical behavior at the cellular or…
Cellular uptake through the lipid membranes plays an important role in adsorbing nutrients and fighting infection and can be used for drug delivery and nanomedicine developments. Endocytosis is one of the known pathways of the cellular…
Living cells move thanks to assemblies of actin filaments and myosin motors that range from very organized striated muscle tissue to disordered intracellular bundles. The mechanisms powering these disordered structures are debated, and all…
Biological membranes undergo noticeable thermal fluctuations at physiological temperatures. When two membranes approach each other, they hinder the out of plane fluctuations of the other. This hindrance leads to an entropic repulsive force…
Wounds in the embryo show a remarkable ability to heal quickly without leaving a scar. Previous studies have found that an actomyosin ring ("purse string") forms around the wound perimeter and contracts to close the wound over the course of…
We study fluid flow at the interfaces between elastic solids with randomly rough, self-affine surfaces. We show by numerical simulation that elastic deformation lowers the relative contact area at which contact patches percolate in…
Mechanics has an important role during morphogenesis, both in the generation of forces driving cell shape changes and in determining the effective material properties of cells and tissues. Drosophila dorsal closure (DC) has emerged as a…
Embryonic tissues deform across broad spatial and temporal scales and relax stress through active rearrangements. A quantitative link between cell-scale activity, spatial forcing, and emergent tissue-scale mechanics remains incomplete.…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
The elastic properties of a material with spherical voids of equal volume are analysed using a new model, with particular attention paid to the hexagonal close-packed and the face-centred cubic arrangement of voids. Void fractions well…
Wounding is a severe impairment of function, especially for an exposed organism like the network-forming true slime mould Physarum polycephalum. The tubular network making up the organism's body plan is entirely interconnected and shares a…
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…
Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…
A recent experiment on zebrafish blastoderm morphogenesis showed that the viscosity ({\eta}) of a non-confluent embryonic tissue grows sharply until a critical cell packing fraction ({\phi}S). The increase in {\eta} up to {\phi}S is similar…
We study the mechanics of a reversible decohesion (unzipping) of an elastic layer subjected to quasi-static end-point loading. At the micro level the system is simulated by an elastic chain of particles interacting with a rigid foundation…
We study the mechanical contact between a deformable body with a wavy surface and a rigid flat taking into account pressurized fluid trapped in the interface. A finite element model is formulated for a general problem of trapped fluid for…
Several models have been proposed to describe the dynamics of epithelial tissues undergoing morphogenetic changes driven by apical constriction pulses, which differ in where the constriction is applied, either at the perimeter or medial…