Related papers: Living Capillary Bridges
In this paper we address some modelling issues related to biological growth. Our treatment is based on a recently-proposed, general formulation for growth within the context of Mixture Theory (Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids,…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is important across biology, physics, and materials science. Although usually studied at equilibrium, active components - such as motor proteins, enzymes, and synthetic microswimmers - are increasingly…
Active fluids generate spontaneous, often chaotic mesoscale flows. Harnessing these flows to drive embedded soft materials into structures with controlled length scales and lifetimes is a key challenge at the interface between the fields of…
This work presents a combined experimental and theoretical study of dynamic contact angle hysteresis using liquid bridges under cyclic compression and stretching between two identical plates. Under various loading rates, contact angle…
We investigate the phase diagram of a two-component associating fluid mixture in the presence of selectively adsorbing substrates. The mixture is characterized by a bulk phase diagram which displays peculiar features such as closed loops of…
We employ the state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulations to study the kinetics of phase separation and aging phenomena of segregating binary fluid mixtures imbibed in porous materials. Different random porous structures are considered…
We analyze the displacements of the particles of a glass-forming molecular liquid perpendicular to a confining solid surface, using extensive molecular dynamics simulations with atomistic models. In the vicinity of an attractive surface,…
Coarsening, the process where larger structures grow at the expense of smaller ones, is a fundamental aspect of multiphase systems. The cell cytoplasm exemplifies an out-of-equilibrium multiphase system, where phase-separated condensates…
The impact dynamics between wet surfaces, which dominates the mechanical properties of wet granular matter, is studied both experimentally and theoretically. It is shown that the hysteretic formation and rupture of liquid capillary bridges…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
Multicellular aggregates are known to exhibit liquid-like properties. The fusion process of two cell aggregates is commonly studied as the coalescence of two viscous drops. However, tissues are complex materials and can exhibit viscoelastic…
The formation and destabilisation of viscoelastic filaments are of importance in many industrial and biological processes. Filament instabilities have been observed for viscoelastic fluids but recently also for soft elastic solids. In this…
Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…
Plants have developed intricate mechanisms to adapt to changing light conditions. Besides photo- and helio- tropism -- the differential growth towards light and the diurnal motion with respect to sunlight -- chloroplast motion acts as a…
When a suspension dries, the suspending fluid evaporates, leaving behind a dry film composed of the suspended particles. During the final stages of drying, the height of the fluid film on the substrate drops below the particle size,…
Active matter studies are increasingly geared towards the high-density or glassy limit. This is mainly inspired by the remarkable resemblance between active glassy materials and conventional passive glassy matter. Interestingly, within this…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the mechanical relaxation of cells within a curved epithelial tissue layer represented by an arbitrary curve in two-dimensional space. This model generalises previous one-dimensional models…
Cell monolayers and epithelial tissues display slow dynamics during the liquid-glass transitions, a phenomenon with direct relevance to embryogenesis, tumor metastases, and wound healing. In active cells, persistent motion and cell…