Related papers: Cell-induced wrinkling patterns on soft substrates

Experimentally measuring the elastic properties of thin biological surfaces is non-trivial, particularly when they are curved. One technique that may be used is the indentation of a thin sheet of material by a rigid indenter, whilst…

Wrinkling, creasing and folding are frequent phenomena encountered in biological and man-made bilayers made by thin films bonded to thicker and softer substrates often containing fibers. Paradigmatic examples of the latter are the skin, the…

We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…

Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…

We investigate the mechanical response of a compressed monolayer of large and dense particles at a liquid-fluid interface: a granular raft. Upon compression, rafts first wrinkle; then, as the confinement increases, the deformation localizes…

A partially-wetting liquid can deform the underlying elastic substrate upon which it rests. This situation requires the development of theoretical models to describe the wetting forces imparted by the drop onto the solid substrate,…

Many tissues take the form of thin sheets, being only a single cell thick, but millions of cells wide. These tissue sheets can bend and buckle in the third dimension. In this work, we investigated the growth and shrinkage of suspended and…

Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…

Lubrication forces depend to a high degree on elasticity, texture, charge, chemistry, and temperature of the interacting surfaces. Therefore, by appropriately designing surface properties, we may tailor lubrication forces to reduce…

We introduce a particle-based model of self-replicating cells on a deformable substrate composed of the dermis and the basement membrane and investigate the relationship between dermal deformations and stem cell pattering on it. We show…

Small scale contact between a soft, liquid-coated layer and a stiff surface is common in many situations, from synovial fluid on articular cartilage to adhesives in humid environments. Moreover, many model studies on soft adhesive contacts…

Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…

Collective behaviors in cellular systems are regulated not only by biochemical signalling pathways but also by intercellular mechanical forces, whose quantification in contractile monolayers remains poorly understood. Here, by integrating…

This work investigates the morphological stability of a soft body composed of two heavy elastic layers, attached to a rigid surface and subjected only to the bulk gravity force. Using theoretical and computational tools, we characterize the…

Granular surfaces tend to develop lateral ripples under the action of surface forces exerted by rolling wheels, an effect known as washboard or corrugated road. We report the results of both laboratory experiments and soft-particle direct…

Wrinkles are often observed on the surfaces of compressed soft materials in nature. In the past few decades, the fascinating surface patterns have been studied extensively by using the linear bifurcation analysis under plane strain. The…

The migration behavior of colliding cells is critically determined by transient contact-interactions. During these interactions, the motility machinery, including the front-rear polarization of the cell, dynamically responds to surface…

Living cells establish long-range orientational order through collective alignment, giving rise to topological defects whose functional relevance is increasingly recognized in tissue organization and morphogenesis. Engineered topographical…

An exactly solvable family of models describing the wrinkling of substrate-supported inextensible elastic rings under compression is identified. The resulting wrinkle profiles are shown to be related to the buckled states of an unsupported…

We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…