Related papers: Necking of epithelial tissues with cellular topolo…
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…
We develop a simple computational model for cell boundary evolution in plastic deformation. We study the cell boundary size distribution and cell boundary misorientation distribution that experimentally have been found to have scaling forms…
Cells and tissues change shape both to carry out their function and during pathology. In most cases, these deformations are driven from within the systems themselves. This is permitted by a range of molecular actors, such as active…
We simulate a two dimensional model of self-propelled particles confined by a deformable boundary. The particles tend to accumulate near the boundary and the shape of the boundary deforms upon the collisions. We find that there are two…
Topological defects play a central role in the formation and organization of various biological systems. Historically, such nonequilibrium defects have been mainly studied in the context of homogeneous active nematics. Phase-separated…
Localized pattern formations and "two-phase" deformations are studied theoretically in soft compressible cylinders subject to surface tension and axial loading through several force-controlled loading scenarios. By drawing upon known…
A notable feature of the elephant trunk is the pronounced wrinkling that enables its great flexibility. Here, we devise a general mathematical model that accounts for the characteristic skin wrinkles formed during morphogenesis in the…
Tissues are characterized by layers of functional units such as cells and extracellular matrix (ECM). Nevertheless, how dynamics at interlayer interfaces help transmit cellular forces in tissues remains overlooked. Here, we investigate a…
Colloidal gels consist of percolating networks of interconnected arms. Their mechanical properties depend on the individual arms, and on their collective behaviour. We use numerical simulations to pull on a single arm, built from a model…
Colloids dispersed in nematic liquid crystals form topological composites in which colloid-associated defects mediate interactions while adhering to fundamental topological constraints. Better realising the promise of such materials…
The majority of solid tumours arise in epithelia and therefore much research effort has gone into investigating the growth, renewal and regulation of these tissues. Here we review different mathematical and computational approaches that…
Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid…
We consider bifurcations from the homogeneous solution of a circular or square hyperelastic sheet that is subjected to equibiaxial stretching under either force- or displacement-controlled edge conditions. We derive the condition for…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
During epithelial wound healing, cell morphology near the healed wound and the healing rate vary strongly among different developmental stages even for a single species like \textit{Drosophila}. We develop deformable particle (DP) model…
The deformability of vesicles critically influences their engulfment by lipid membranes, a process central to endocytosis, viral entry, drug delivery, and intercellular transport. While theoretical models have long predicted this influence,…
The flows of tissues of epithelial cells often involve T1 transitions. These neighbour exchanges are irreversible rearrangements crossing an energy barrier. Here, by an exact geometric construction, I determine this energy barrier for…
Epithelial cell monolayers exhibit traveling mechanical waves. We rationalize this observation thanks to a hydrodynamic description of the monolayer as a compressible, active and polar material. We show that propagating waves of the cell…
The Vertex Model for epithelia models the apical surface of the tissue by a tiling, with polygons representing cells and edges representing cell-cell junctions. The mechanics are described by an energy governed by deviations from a target…
Aging is driven by subcellular processes that are relatively well-understood. However the qualitative mechanisms and quantitative dynamics of how these micro-level failures cascade to a macro-level catastrophe in a tissue or organs remain…