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One of the key characteristics of multicellular organisms is the ability to establish and maintain shapes, or morphologies, under a variety of physical and chemical perturbations. A quantitative description of the underlying morphological…
We present a systematic study of the influence of cell geometry on the orientational distribution of microtubules (MTs) nucleated from a single microtubule organizing center (MTOC). For simplicity we consider an elliptical cell geometry, a…
Bacterial colonies growing on surfaces are shaped by mechanical stresses transmitted through the community, governed by the balance between cell growth and steric and cell-substrate interactions. Using overdamped dynamics simulations of…
Hearts subjected to volume overload (VO) are prone to detrimental anatomical and functional changes in response to elevated mechanical loading, ultimately leading to heart failure. Experimental findings now emphasize that organ-scale…
Transitions from quiescence to collective migration in epithelia underlie wound healing and cancer invasion, yet their physical origin remains poorly understood. Here we show that quiescent epithelial monolayers store spatially contractile…
In this article, we investigate the impact of self-alignment and anti-self-alignment on collective phenomena in dense active matter. These mechanisms correspond to effective torques that align or anti-align a particles orientation with its…
The stability of micelles self-assembled from block copolymers can be altered by the degradation of the blocks. Slow degradation shifts the equilibrium size distribution of block copolymer micelles and change their properties.…
Many cellular processes are tightly connected to the dynamics of microtubules (MTs). While in neuronal axons MTs mainly regulate intracellular trafficking, they participate in cytoskeleton reorganization in many other eukaryotic cells,…
Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…
Dynamically crosslinked semiflexible biopolymers such as the actin cytoskeleton govern the mechanical behavior of living cells. Semiflexible biopolymers nonlinearly stiffen in response to mechanical loads, whereas the crosslinker dynamics…
Biological active matter like the cytoskeleton or tissues are characterized by their ability to transform chemical energy into mechanical stress. In addition, it often exhibits orientational order, which is essential for many cellular and…
T cells use sophisticated shape dynamics (morphodynamics) to migrate towards and neutralise infected and cancerous cells. However, there is limited quantitative understanding of the migration process in 3D extracellular matrices (ECMs) and…
Rippling patterns of myxobacteria appear in starving colonies before they aggregate to form fruiting bodies. These periodic traveling cell density waves arise from the coordination of individual cell reversals, resulting from an internal…
Collagen fibrils are the most important structural component of tendons. Their crimped structure and parallel arrangement within the tendon lead to a distinctive non-linear stress-strain curve when a tendon is stretched. Microstructural…
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…
Significant variations of delays among connecting neurons cause an inevitable disadvantage of asynchronous brain dynamics compared to synchronous deep learning. However, this study demonstrates that this disadvantage can be converted into a…
Mechanical stresses are increasingly found to be associated with various biological functionalities. At the same time, topological defects are being identified across a diverse range of biological systems and are points of localized…
The transfer of mechanical signals through cells is a complex phenomenon. To uncover a new mechanotransduction pathway, we study the frequency-dependent transport of mechanical stimuli by single microtubules and small networks in a…
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 main objective of this work is to numerically investigate the effect of geometric imperfections on the macroscopic response and domain formation in soft biological composites that exhibit plasticity in the stiff (fiber) phase.This work…