Related papers: Memory-driven topological ordering during the tran…

Collective cell migration is crucial in many biological processes such as wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and tumor progression. The leading front of a collective migrating epithelial cell layer often destabilizes into multicellular…

Although cell monolayers typically remain confluent, they can spontaneously develop persistent holes as a result of collective cellular motion. Recent studies on MDCK monolayers cultured on soft substrates have revealed that cells can align…

Epithelia are confluent cell layers that self-organize into polygonal networks whose geometry encodes their mechanical state. A principal driver is the tunable contractility of the actomyosin cortex, which links cell-junction tension to…

The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…

Prestress in amorphous solids bears the memory of their formation, and plays a profound role in their mechanical properties, from stiffening or softening elastic moduli to shifting frequencies of vibrational modes, as well as directing…

Materials driven far from equilibrium can encode memories of past deformations through long-lived structural reorganisations. Such memory effects-reflecting parameters such as deformation direction, magnitude, and duration have been widely…

While ubiquitous, energy redistribution remains a poorly understood facet of the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of biomolecules. At the molecular level, finite-size effects, pronounced nonlinearities, and ballistic processes produce behavior…

The ability of cells to reorganize in response to external stimuli is important in areas ranging from morphogenesis to tissue engineering. Elongated cells can co-align due to steric effects, forming states with local order. We show that…

A long standing puzzle in the rheology of living cells is the origin of the experimentally observed long time stress relaxation. The mechanics of the cell is largely dictated by the cytoskeleton, which is a biopolymer network consisting of…

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…

Bone is a stiff and though, hierarchical and continuously evolving material that optimizes its structure to respond to mechanical stimuli, which also govern growth and remodeling processes. However, a full understanding of the underlying…

How do topological defects affect the degree of order in active matter? To answer this question we investigate an agent-based model of self-propelled particles, which accounts for polar alignment and short-ranged repulsive interactions. For…

Elucidating the interplay of defect and stress at the microscopic level is a fundamental physical problem that has strong connection with materials science. Here, based on the two-dimensional crystal model, we show that the instability mode…

Stochastic processes are commonly used models to describe dynamics of a wide variety of nonequilibrium phenomena ranging from electrical transport to biological motion. The transition matrix describing a stochastic process can be regarded…

Collectively moving cellular systems often contain a proportion of dead cells or non-motile genotypes. When mixed, nematically aligning motile and non-motile agents are known to segregate spontaneously. However, the role that topological…

There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…

The plasticity transition at the yield strength of a crystal typically signifies the tendency of dislocation defects towards relatively unrestricted motion. For an isolated dislocation the motion is in the slip plane with velocity…

Correlated velocity patterns and associated large length-scale transmission of traction forces have been observed in collective live cell migration as a response to a "wound". We argue that a simple physical model of a force-driven…

Intracellular cargos which are transported by molecular motors move stochastically along cytoskeleton filaments. In particular for bidirectionally transported cargos it is an open question whether the characteristics of their motion can…

Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…