Related papers: Forces at the scale of the cell
The nucleus of eukaryotic cells typically makes up around 30% of the cell volume and has significantly different mechanics, which can make it effectively up to ten times stiffer than the surrounding cytoplasm. Therefore it is an important…
In this review we summarize theoretical progress in the field of active matter, placing it in the context of recent experiments. Our approach offers a unified framework for the mechanical and statistical properties of living matter:…
In this communication, we propose a model to study the non-equilibrium process by which actin stress fibers develop force in contractile cells. The emphasis here is on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which is necessary to address the…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
Ever since the ground breaking work of Trepat et al. in 2009, we know that cell colonies growing on a substrate can be under tensile mechanical stress. The origin of tension has so far been attributed to cellular motility forces being…
All cells must keep time to consistently perform vital biological functions. To that end, the coupling and interrelatedness of diverse subsecond events in the complex cellular environment, such as protein folding or translation rates,…
Quantitative modeling has become an essential tool in modern biophysics, driven by advances in both experimental techniques and theoretical frameworks. Powerful high-resolution techniques now provide detailed datasets spanning molecular to…
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…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
Understanding how biomechanical reorganization governs key biological processes, such as morphogenesis and development, requires predictive insights into stress distributions and cellular behavior. While traditional approaches focused on…
These lecture notes are designed to provide a brief introduction into the phenomenology of active matter and to present some of the analytical tools used to rationalize the emergent behavior of active systems. Such systems are made of…
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…
Swarming or collective motion of living entities is one of the most common and spectacular manifestations of living systems having been extensively studied in recent years. A number of general principles have been established. The…
Interactions between crawling cells, which are essential for many biological processes, can be quantified by measuring cell-cell collisions. Conventionally, experiments of cell-cell collisions are conducted on two-dimensional flat…
Motivated by the centering of biological objects in large cells, we study the generic properties of centering forces inside a ball (or a volume of spherical topology) in $n$ dimensions. We consider two scenarios : autonomous centering (in…
We develop a microscopic biophysical model for self-organization and reshaping of artificial tissue, that is co-driven by microscopic active forces between cells and extracellular matrix (ECM), and macroscopic forces that develop within the…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Biological systems are influenced by fluid mechanics at nearly all spatiotemporal scales. This broad relevance of fluid mechanics to biology has been increasingly appreciated by engineers and biologists alike, leading to continued expansion…
Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…