Related papers: Stress distribution in contractile cell monolayers

Cells in an epithelial monolayer coordinate motion with their neighbors giving rise to collectively moving packs of sizes spanning multiple cell diameters. The physical mechanism controlling the pack size, however, remains unclear. A…

Cytoskeletal networks, which are essentially motor-filament assemblies, play a major role in many developmental processes involving structural remodeling and shape changes. These are achieved by nonequilibrium self-organization processes…

Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…

Monolayers of growing non-motile rod-shaped bacteria act as active nematic materials composed of hard particles rather than the flexible components of other commonly studied active nematics. The organization of these granular monolayers has…

We derive the expression of the stress tensor for one and two-component lipid membranes with density and composition inhomogeneities. We first express the membrane stress tensor as a function of the free-energy density by means of the…

The vertex model is widely used to simulate the mechanical properties of confluent epithelia and other multicellular tissues. This inherently discrete framework allows a Cauchy stress to be attributed to each cell, and its symmetric…

We have developed a novel scanning probe-based methodology to study cell biomechanics. The time dependence of the force exerted by the cell surface on a scanning probe at constant local deformation has been used to extract local…

The ability of cells to reorganize in response to external stimuli is important in areas ranging from morphogenesis to tissue engineering. Elongated cells can co-align due to steric effects, forming states with local order. We show that…

Mechanical coupling between a cell and substrate relies on focal adhesions, clusters of adhesion proteins linking stress fibers (bundles of actin proteins) inside the cell with surrounding tissue. Focal adhesions have been demonstrated to…

The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…

By modifying and calibrating an active vertex model to experiments, we have simulated numerically a confluent cellular monolayer spreading on an empty space and the collision of two monolayers of different cells in an antagonistic migration…

The shapes of epithelial tissues result from a complex interplay of contractile forces in the cytoskeleta of the cells in the tissue, and adhesion forces between them. A host of discrete, cell-based models describe these forces by assigning…

To understand cell migration, it is crucial to gain knowledge on how cells exert and integrate forces on/from their environment. A quantity of prime interest for biophysicists interested in cell movements modeling is the intracellular…

Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…

The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…

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…

Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…

In amorphous solids as in tissues, neighbor exchanges can relax local stresses and allow the material to flow. In this paper, we use an anisotropic vertex model to study T1 rearrangements in polygonal cellular networks. We consider two…

While mechanobiology has demonstrated that precise control over mechanical properties at the whole-cell level is crucial for many biological functions, comparatively little attention has been paid to the intracellular mechanical properties.…

Cross-sections of cell shapes in a tissue monolayer typically resemble a tiling of convex polygons. Yet, examples exist where the polygons are not convex with curved cell-cell interfaces, as seen in the adaxial epidermis. To date,…