Related papers: Biomedical active matter: Emergence and breakdown …
Interacting individuals in complex systems often give rise to coherent motion exhibiting coordinated global structures. Such phenomena are ubiquitously observed in nature, from cell migration, bacterial swarms, animal and insect groups, and…
The cytoskeleton -- a collection of polymeric filaments, molecular motors, and crosslinkers -- is a foundational example of active matter, and in the cell assembles into organelles that guide basic biological functions. Simulation of…
Living microorganisms have evolved dedicated sensory machinery to detect environmental perturbations, processing these signals through biochemical networks to guide behavior. Replicating such capabilities in synthetic active matter remains…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Bacterial colonies are a well-known example of living active matter, exhibiting collective behaviors such as nematic alignment and collective motion that play an important role in the spread of microbial infections. While the underlying…
Droplets, sub-millilitre liquid volumes with at least one interface, have traditionally served as compartments for storing, transporting, and delivering materials. Beyond familiar applications in food, coatings, and consumer goods, they…
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…
Understanding the out-of-equilibrium properties of noisy microscale systems and the extent to which they can be modulated externally, is a crucial scientific and technological challenge. It holds the promise to unlock disruptive new…
We identify the components of bio-inspired artificial camouflage systems including actuation, sensing, and distributed computation. After summarizing recent results in understanding the physiology and system-level performance of a variety…
Composition is a powerful principle for systems biology, focused on the interfaces, interconnections, and orchestration of distributed processes to enable integrative multiscale simulations. Whereas traditional models focus on the structure…
Motor proteins drive persistent motion and self-organisation of cytoskeletal filaments. However, state-of-the-art microscopy techniques and continuum modelling approaches focus on large length and time scales. Here, we perform…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…
Transport phenomena in out-of-equilibrium systems is immensely important in a myriad of applications in biology, engineering and physics. Complex environments, such as the cytoplasm or porous media, can substantially affect the transport…
Fueled by breakthrough technology developments, the biological, biomedical, and behavioral sciences are now collecting more data than ever before. There is a critical need for time- and cost-efficient strategies to analyze and interpret…
From bird flocks and fish schools to migrating cell sheets, collective motion is a ubiquitous biological phenomenon that inspires quantitative modeling through self-propelled particle (SPP) frameworks. Conventional SPP models prescribe…
Here we show that coupling to curvature has profound effects on collective motion in active systems, leading to patterns not observed in flat space. Biological examples of such active motion in curved environments are numerous: curvature…
With the aim of understanding the emergence of collective motion from local interactions of organisms in a "noisy" environment, we study biologically inspired, inherently non-equilibrium models consisting of self-propelled particles. In…
Tumor cells invade individually or in groups, mediated by mechanical interactions between cells and their surrounding matrix. These multicellular dynamics are reminiscent of leader-follower coordination and epithelial-mesenchymal…