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The interaction between nano- or micro-sized particles and cell membranes is of crucial importance in many biological and biomedical applications such as drug and gene delivery to cells and tissues. During their cellular uptake, the…
Lipid membranes are abundant in living organisms, where they constitute a surrounding shell for cells and their organelles. There are many circumstances in which the deformations of lipid membranes are involved in living cells: fusion and…
Motivated by recent experiments showing the buckling of microtubules in cells, we study theoretically the mechanical response of, and force propagation along elastic filaments embedded in a non-linear elastic medium. We find that, although…
Transport of microscopic objects across biological membranes usually involves membrane deformation to enclose the object followed by detachment of the engulfed particle. However, in artificial membranes, this last topological remodelling…
We theoretically investigate the membrane fluctuations of red blood cells with focus laid on the role of the cytoskeleton, viewing the system as a membrane coupled to sparse spring network. This model is exactly solvable and enables us to…
We examine the budding of a nanoscale particle through a lipid bilayer using molecular dynamics simulations, free energy calculations, and an elastic theory, with the aim of determining the extent to which equilibrium elasticity theory can…
Protrusions at the leading-edge of a cell play an important role in sensing the extracellular cues, during cellular spreading and motility. Recent studies provided indications that these protrusions wrap (coil) around the extra-cellular…
Gaining access to the cell interior is fundamental for many applications, such as electrical recording, drug and biomolecular delivery. A very promising technique consists of culturing cells on nano/micro pillars. The tight adhesion and…
Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…
Eukaryotic cells intrinsically change their shape, by changing the composition of their membrane and by restructuring their underlying cytoskeleton. We present here further studies and extensions of a minimal physical model, describing a…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
Phagocytosis is a fundamental process of the innate immune system, yet the physical determinants that govern the engulfment of soft, deformable targets remain poorly understood. Existing theoretical models typically approximate targets as…
Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…
Endocytosis is a key cellular process involved in the uptake of nutrients, pathogens or the diagnosis and therapy of diseases. Most studies have focused on spherical objects, whereas biologically relevant shapes can be highly anisotropic.…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
The mammalian cell membrane is embedded with biomolecular condensates of protein and lipid clusters, which interact with an underlying viscoelastic cytoskeleton network to organize the cell surface and mechanically interact with the…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
Endocytosis is an essential process by which cells internalize a piece of plasma membrane and material from the outside. In cells with turgor, pressure opposes membrane defor- mations, and increases the amount of force that has to be…