Related papers: Nonlinear Elasticity in Biological Gels
Nanoscale and microscale confinement of biopolymers naturally occurs in cells and has been recently achieved in artificial structures designed for nanotechnological applications. Here, we present an extensive theoretical investigation of…
The native state structures of globular proteins are stable and well-packed indicating that self-interactions are favored over protein-solvent interactions under folding conditions. We use this as a guiding principle to derive the geometry…
Everyday experience shows that cellular sheets are stiffened by the presence of a pressurized gas: from bicycle inner tubes to bubble wrap, the presence of an internal pressure increases the stiffness of otherwise floppy structures. The…
Tissues commonly consist of cells embedded within a fibrous biopolymer network. Whereas cell-free reconstituted biopolymer networks typically soften under applied uniaxial compression, various tissues, including liver, brain, and fat, have…
Disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks exhibit a low linear elastic shear modulus at small strains, but stiffen dramatically at high strains. Experiments have shown that the elastic modulus can increase by up to three…
Collagen is the most abundant extracellular-matrix protein in mammals and the main structural and load-bearing element of connective tissues. Collagen networks show remarkable strain-stiffening properties which tune the mechanical functions…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
The rheological properties of fibrin networks have been of long-standing interest. As such there is a wealth of studies of their shear and tensile responses, but their compressive behavior remains unexplored. Here, by characterization of…
Biopolymer gels such as fibrin and collagen networks are known to develop tensile axial stress when subject to torsion. This negative normal stress is opposite to the classical Poynting effect observed for most elastic solids including…
Recent experimental results on the static or quasistatic response of granular materials have been interpreted to suggest the inapplicability of the traditional engineering approaches, which are based on elasto-plastic models (which are…
Covering elastic substrates with stiff biomimetic scales significantly alters the bending behavior via scales engagement. This engagement is the dominant source of nonlinearity in small deflection regime. As deformation proceeds, an…
We introduce a strain-energy based nonlinear hyper-elastic formulation to model the material properties of ultrasoft dielectric elastomers over a wide range of elastic properties, prestretch, and thicknesses. We build on the uniaxial Gent…
Heterogeneous growth plays an important role in the shape and pattern formation of thin elastic structures ranging from the petals of blooming lilies to the cell walls of growing bacteria. Here we address the stability and regulation of…
Strain gradient elasticity and nonlocal elasticity are two enhanced elastic theories intensively used over the last fifty years to explain static and dynamic phenomena that classical elasticity fails to do. The nonlocal elastic theory has a…
We study computationally the creep and yielding of athermal gels and fibre network materials under a constant imposed shear stress, within a minimal model of interconnected filaments with central forces in $d=2$ spatial dimensions. Each…
Recent experimental and theoretical studies suggest that crystallization and glass-like solidification are useful analogies for understanding cell ordering in confluent biological tissues. It remains unexplored how cellular ordering…
The geometrically rigorous nonlinear analysis of elastic shells is considered in the context of finite, but small, strain theory. The research is focused on the introduction of the full shell metric and examination of its influence on the…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
In comparative and developmental neuroanatomy one encounters questions regarding the deformation of neural tissue under stress. The motivation of this note is an observation (Barbas {\it et al}) that at cortical folds or gyri, the layers of…