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Cell migration is essential for regulating many biological processes in physiological or pathological conditions, including embryonic development and cancer invasion. In vitro and in silico studies suggest that collective cell migration is…
The coupling of the internal mechanisms of cell polarization to cell shape deformations and subsequent cell crawling poses many interdisciplinary scientific challenges. Several mathematical approaches have been proposed to model the…
While it is commonly observed that the shape dynamics of mammalian cells can undergo large random fluctuations, theoretical models aiming at capturing cell mechanics often focus on the deterministic part of the motion. In this paper, we…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Cells and microorganisms adopt various strategies to migrate in response to different environmental stimuli. To date, many modeling research has focused on the crawling-based Dictyostelium discoideum (Dd) cells migration induced by…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
The dynamic interplay between collective cell movement and the various molecules involved in the accompanying cell signalling mechanisms plays a crucial role in many biological processes including normal tissue development and pathological…
Understanding the mechanisms of interactions within cells, tissues, and organisms is crucial to driving developments across biology and medicine. Mathematical modeling is an essential tool for simulating biological systems and revealing…
The mechanics of crawling cells on a substrate is investigated by using a minimal model that satisfies the force-free condition. A cell is described by two subcellular elements connected by a linear actuator that changes the length of the…
Chemotaxis combines three processes: directional sensing, polarity reorientation and migration. Directed migration plays an important role in immune response, metastasis, wound healing and development. To describe chemotaxis, we extend a…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Cellular contractility, migration, and extracellular matrix (ECM) mechanics are critical for a wide range of biological processes including embryonic development, wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and regeneration. Even though the…
Chemotaxis and haptotaxis have been a main theme in the macroscopic study of bacterial and cellular motility. In this work we investigate the influence these processes have on the shape and motility of fast migrating cells. We note that…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
Multicellular collective migration is a ubiquitous strategy of cells to translocate spatially in diverse tissue environments to accomplish a wide variety of biological phenomena, viz. embryonic development, wound healing, and tumor…
The present article is an invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science, Robert A. Meyers Ed., Springer New York (2009). It is a review of the biophysical mechanisms that underly cell motility. It mainly focuses…
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…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…