Related papers: Living Capillary Bridges
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
Liquid bridges form between particles during wet mixing with binders or by condensation due to ambient humidity. The consequences of capillary bridges can be quite drastic, creating macroscopic cohesion, as seen in sandcastles and in the…
Hypothesis: Droplet coalescence is a common phenomenon and plays an important role in many applications. When two liquid droplets are brought into contact, a liquid bridge forms and expands quickly. Different from miscible droplets, an…
Filamentous cyanobacteria, forming long strands of connected cells, are one of the earliest and most successful forms of life on Earth. They exhibit self-organised behaviour, forming large-scale patterns in structures like biomats and…
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating…
We propose a simple phenomenological model for wet granular media to take into account many particle interaction through liquid in the funicular state as well as two-body cohesive force by a liquid bridge in the pendular state. In the wet…
The effect of 'bridge splitting' is considered in the case of capillary adhesion: for a fixed total volume of liquid, does having more capillary bridges increase the total adhesion force? Previous studies have shown that the…
We experimentally study the dynamics of active particles (APs) in a viscoelastic fluid under various geometrical constraints such as flat walls, spherical obstacles and cylindrical cavities. We observe that the main effect of the confined…
We investigate the structural and dynamic properties of active Brownian particles (APs) confined within a soft annulus-shaped channel. Depending on the strength of the confinement and the P\'eclet number, we observe a novel re-entrant…
Experiments and theory have shown that cell monolayers and epithelial tissues exhibit solid-liquid and glass-liquid transitions. These transitions are biologically relevant to our understanding of embryonic development, wound healing, and…
Dense soft glasses show strong collective caging behavior at sufficiently low temperatures. Using molecular dynamics simulations of a model glass former, we show that the incorporation of activity or self-propulsion, f0, can induce cage…
We have performed confocal microscopy experiments and computer simulations of colloidal suspensions with moderate volume fraction confined between two quasi-parallel, rough walls [A. Villada-Balbuena et al., Soft Matter, 2022, 18,…
We identify putative load-bearing structures (bridges) in experimental colloidal systems studied by confocal microscopy. Bridges are co-operative structures that have been used to explain stability and inhomogeneous force transmission in…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
Active matter embraces systems that self-organize at different length and time scales, often exhibiting turbulent flows. Here, we use a quasi-two-dimensional nematically ordered layer of a protein-based active gel to experimentally…
Many biological tissues are viscoelastic, behaving as elastic solids on short timescales and fluids on long timescales. This collective mechanical behavior enables and helps to guide pattern formation and tissue layering. Here we…
Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…
Coordinated and cooperative motion of cells is essential for embryonic development, tissue morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer invasion. A predictive understanding of the emergent mechanical behaviors in collective cell motion is…
Computer simulations of bi-continuous two-phase fluids with intersparsed dumbbells show that, unlike rigid colloids, soft dumbbells do not lead to arrested coarsening. However, they significantly alter the curvature dynamics of the…
The elastic properties of granular hydrogels are commonly characterised under wet conditions, yet the influence of capillary interactions remains unclear. In practical applications, hydrogels operate in aqueous environments containing…