Related papers: Cell divisions suppress dynamical correlations in …
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
The stability of the boundary between regenerating tissues is essential to the maintenance of their integrity and biological function. Stress is known to play an important role in the regulation of cell division, cell growth and cell death,…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the mechanical relaxation of cells within a curved epithelial tissue layer represented by an arbitrary curve in two-dimensional space. This model generalises previous one-dimensional models…
Living materials such as membranes, cytoskeletal assemblies, cell collectives and tissues can often be described as active solids -- materials that are energized from within, with elastic response about a well defined reference…
Active matter systems such as eukaryotic cells and bacteria continuously transform chemical energy to motion. Hence living systems exert active stresses on the complex environments in which they reside. One recurring aspect of this…
Randomly crosslinked macromolecules undergo a liquid-to-amorphous solid phase transition at a critical crosslink concentration. This transition has two main signatures: the random localization of a fraction of the monomers and the emergence…
We introduce the notion of cell division-induced activity and show that the cell division generates extensile forces and drives dynamical patterns in cell assemblies. Extending the hydrodynamic models of lyotropic active nematics we…
We present the results of numerical simulations of an atomistic system undergoing plastic shear flow in the athermal, quasistatic limit. The system is shown to undergo cascades of local rearrangements, associated with quadrupolar energy…
Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…
The yielding transition that occurs in amorphous solids under athermal quasistatic deformation has been the subject of many theoretical and computational studies. Here, we extend this analysis to include thermal effects at finite shear…
We study phase separation between coexisting active and passive fluids in three-dimensions, using numerical simulation and experiments. Chaotic flows of the active phase drive giant interfacial deformations, causing the co-existing phases…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Liquid foams are archetypal athermal amorphous solids whose elasticity arises from the jamming of densely packed bubbles. We investigate the stress relaxation of non-ageing liquid foams following flow cessation, using fast X-ray…
The behaviour of elastic structures undergoing large deformations is the result of the competition between confining conditions, self-avoidance and elasticity. This combination of multiple phenomena creates a geometrical frustration that…
Remarkably persistent mixing and non-mixing regions (islands) are observed to coexist in a three-dimensional dynamical system where randomness is expected. The track of an x-ray opaque particle in a spherical shell half-filled with dry…
Modeling the dynamics of colloidal rods remains a central challenge in soft-matter physics due to the anisotropic and long-ranged nature of their interactions. Hydrodynamic interactions in rods suspensions are often assumed to be screened…
From the perspective of physical properties, the cell membrane is an exotic two-dimensional material that has a dual nature: it exhibits characteristics of fluids, i.e., lipid molecules show lateral diffusion, while also demonstrating…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is key to understanding aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS) arising throughout cell biology, medical science, and the pharmaceutical industry. Controlling the detailed morphology of phase-separating compound…
Cell crawling crucially depends on the collective dynamics of the acto-myosin cytoskeleton. However, it remains an open question to what extent cell polarization and persistent motion depend on continuous regulatory mechanisms and…
In this paper, we bring together our efforts in identifying and understanding nonequilibrium phase segregation driven by active processes in the living cell, with special focus on the segregation of cell membrane components driven by active…