Related papers: Cell-Cell Adhesion as a Double-Edged Sword in Tiss…
Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…
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 rheology of biological tissue plays an important role in many processes, from organ formation to cancer invasion. Here, we use a multi-phase field model of motile cells to simulate active microrheology within a tissue monolayer. When…
A quantitative understanding of how cells interact with their extracellular matrix via molecular bonds is fundamental for many important processes in cell biology and engineering. In these interactions, the deformability of cells and matrix…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. First, we introduce a new theoretical framework, reaction-diffusion system on `chemical species…
The migratory dynamics of cells can be influenced by the complex micro-environment through which they move. It remains unclear how the motility machinery of confined cells responds and adapts to their micro-environment. Here, we propose a…
Mechanically active cells in soft media act as force dipoles. The resulting elastic interactions are long-ranged and favor the formation of strings. We show analytically that due to screening, the effective interaction between strings…
Mechanical cues like the rigidity of the substrate are main determinants for the decision making of adherent cells. Here we use a mechano-chemical model to predict the cellular response to varying substrate stiffness. The model equations…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
Cancer cells exhibit increased motility and proliferation, which are instrumental in the formation of tumours and metastases. These pathological changes can be traced back to malfunctions of cellular signalling pathways, and calcium…
Epithelial tissues are driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium by internally generated forces, causing complex patterns of motion. Even when both the forces and motion are measurable, it is not yet possible to relate the two, because the…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
Migrating cells exhibit various motility patterns, resulting from different migration mechanisms, cell properties, or cell-environment interactions. The complexity of cell dynamics is reflected, e.g., in the diversity of the observed forms…
Biological cells embedded in fibrous matrices have been observed to form inter-cellular bands of dense and aligned fibers, through which they mechanically interact over long distances. Such matrix-mediated cellular interactions have been…
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…
We analyse a multi-phase field model for an epithelial monolayer with pairwise adhesions between neighbouring cells following an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, representing the stochastic turnover of junctional molecular motors. These…
In this work we approach cell migration under a large-scale assumption, so that the system reduces to a particle in motion. Unlike classical particle models, the cell displacement results from its internal activity: the cell velocity is a…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
We compare three different setups for measuring cell-cell adhesion. We show that the measured strength depends on the type of setup that is used. For identical cells different assays measure different detachment forces. This can be…
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,…