Related papers: Elastic interactions of active cells with soft mat…
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating the motility of…
Material renewability in active living systems, such as in cells and tissues, can drive the large-scale patterning of forces, with distinctive phenotypic consequences. This is especially significant in the cell cytoskeleton, where multiple…
The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…
The hygro-mechanical behavior of a hierarchical cellular material, i.e. growth rings of softwood is investigated using a two-scale micro-mechanics model based on a computational homogenization technique. The lower scale considers the…
During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…
Epithelial tissues play a fundamental role in various morphogenetic events during development and early embryogenesis. Although epithelial monolayers are often modeled as two-dimensional (2D) elastic surfaces, they distinguish themselves…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
Amongst the various fascinating types of material behavior featured by magnetic gels and elastomers are magnetostrictive effects. That is, deformations in shape or changes in volume are induced from outside by external magnetic fields.…
We consider the elastic energy of a hanging drape -- a thin elastic sheet, pulled down by the force of gravity, with fine-scale folding at the top that achieves approximately uniform confinement. This example of energy-driven pattern…
Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…
Receptor-mediated endocytosis requires that the energy of adhesion overcomes the deformation energy of the plasma membrane. The resulting driving force is balanced by dissipative forces, leading to deterministic dynamical equations. While…
In recent work, it was shown that elasticity theory can break down in amorphous solids subjected to nonuniform {\em static} loads. The elastic fields are screened by geometric dipoles; these stem from gradients of the quadrupole field…
Macroscopic elastic core-shell systems can be generated as toy models to be deformed and haptically studied by hand. On the mesoscale, colloidal core-shell particles and microgels are fabricated and investigated by different types of…
We compare three different setups for measuring cell-cell adhesion. We show that the measured strength depends on the type of setup that is used. For identical cells different assays measure different detachment forces. This can be…
Biological cells embedded in fibrous matrices have been observed to form inter-cellular bands of dense and aligned fibers, through which they mechanically interact over long distances. Such matrix-mediated cellular interactions have been…
Cellular form and function emerge from complex mechanochemical systems within the cytoplasm. No systematic strategy currently exists to infer large-scale physical properties of a cell from its many molecular components. This is a…
To understand cell migration, it is crucial to gain knowledge on how cells exert and integrate forces on/from their environment. A quantity of prime interest for biophysicists interested in cell movements modeling is the intracellular…
Observations of single epidermal cells on flat adhesive substrates have revealed two distinct morphological and functional states, namely a non-migrating symmetric unpolarized state and a migrating asymmetric polarized state. These states…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
Biological cells are built up from many different constituents of varying size and stiffness which all contribute to the cell's mechanical properties. Despite this heterogeneity, in the analysis of experimental measurements such as atomic…