Related papers: Cell clusters sense their global shape to drive co…
Locomotion is essential for living cells. It enables bacteria and algae to explore space for food, cancer to spread, and immune system to fight infections. Motile cells display trajectories of intriguing complexity, from regular (e.g.…
To understand the relationship between the chirality of individual cells and that of tissues and organisms, we have developed a chiral polarized particle model to investigate the movement of cell populations on substrates. Our model…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
Cells often migrate on curved surfaces inside the body, such as curved tissues, blood vessels or highly curved protrusions of other cells. Recent \textit{in-vitro} experiments provide clear evidence that motile cells are affected by the…
Planar cell polarity (PCP), the coherent in-plane polarization of a tissue on multicellular length scales, provides directional information that guides a multitude of developmental processes at cellular and tissue levels. While it is…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
Cell migration is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes. During migration, a cell adapts its morphology, including the overall morphology and nucleus morphology, in response to various cues in complex microenvironments,…
Various molecules exclusively accumulate at the front or back of migrating eukaryotic cells in response to a shallow gradient of extracellular signals. Directional sensing and signal amplification highlight the essential properties in the…
Collective cell migration in 3D extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes. Migrating cells can generate active pulling forces via actin filament contraction, which are transmitted to the ECM…
Epithelial tissues form physically integrated barriers against the external environment protecting organs from infection and invasion. Within each tissue, epithelial cells respond to different challenges that can potentially compromise…
Experimental studies of cell motility in culture have shown that under adequate conditions these living organisms possess the ability to organize themselves into complex structures. Such structures may exhibit a synergy that greatly…
The coordinated behaviors of epithelial cells are widely observed in tissue development, such as re-epithelialization, tumor growth, and morphogenesis. In these processes, cells either migrate collectively or organize themselves into…
Metastasis is a process of cell migration that can be collective and guided by chemical cues. Viewing metastasis in this way, as a physical phenomenon, allows one to draw upon insights from other studies of collective sensing and migration…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…
We use a high-resolution N-body simulation to study how the influence of large-scale structure in and around clusters causes correlated signals in different physical probes and discuss some implications this has for multi-physics probes of…
Cell polarization and directional cell migration can display random, persistent and oscillatory dynamic patterns. However, it is not clear if these polarity patterns can be explained by the same underlying regulatory mechanism. Here, we…
The growth of several biological tissues is known to be controlled in part by local geometrical features, such as the curvature of the tissue interface. This control leads to changes in tissue shape that in turn can affect the tissue's…
Cells are strongly out-of-equilibrium systems driven by continuous energy supply. They carry out many vital functions requiring active transport of various ingredients and organelles, some being small, others being large. The cytoskeleton,…
Collectively coordinated cell migration plays a role in tissue embryogenesis, cancer, homeostasis and healing. To study these processes, different cell-based modelling approaches have been developed, ranging from lattice-based cellular…