Related papers: Cell-induced wrinkling patterns on soft substrates
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
We investigate a continuum mechanical model for an adherent cell on two dimensional adhesive micropatterned substrates. The cell is modeled as an isotropic and homogeneous elastic material subject to uniform internal contractile stresses.…
We present a continuum model of the coupling between cells and substrate that accounts for some of the observed substrate-stiffness dependence of cell properties. The cell is modeled as an elastic active gel, adapting recently developed…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
Induced by proteins within the cell membrane or by differential growth, heating, or swelling, spontaneous curvatures can drastically affect the morphology of thin bodies and induce mechanical instabilities. Yet, the interaction of…
How much energy does it take to stamp a thin elastic shell flat? Motivated by recent experiments on the wrinkling patterns of floating shells, we develop a rigorous method via $\Gamma$-convergence for answering this question to leading…
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,…
Thin rigid sheets floating on a liquid substrate appear, for example, in coatings and surfactant monolayers. Upon uniaxial compression the sheet undergoes transitions from a compressed flat state to a periodic wrinkled pattern to a…
We consider a disk-shaped thin elastic sheet bonded to a compliant sphere. (Our sheet can slip along the sphere; the bonding controls only its normal displacement.) If the bonding is stiff (but not too stiff), the geometry of the sphere…
Thin elastic sheets supported on compliant media form wrinkles under lateral compression. Since the lateral pressure is coupled to the sheet's deformation, varying it periodically in time creates a parametric excitation. We study the…
Thin solids often develop elastic instabilities and subsequently complex, multiscale deformation patterns. Revealing the organizing principles of this spatial complexity has ramifications for our understanding of morphogenetic processes in…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes…
Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…
Wrinkling of stretched elastic sheets is widely observed, and the scaling relations between the amplitude and wavelength of the wrinkles have been proposed by Cerda and Mahadevan. However, the surface effects should be taken into account…
The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity transition controlled by a mechanical parameter that…
Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
We show that a smooth giant voltage actuation of soft dielectric plates is not easily obtained in practice. In principle one can exploit, through pre-deformation, the snap-through behavior of their loading curve to deliver a large stretch…
The processing of thin-structured materials in a fluidic environment, from nearly inextensible but flexible graphene sheets to highly extensible polymer films, arises in many applications. So far, little is known about the dynamics of such…