Related papers: Dynamic Phase Transitions in Cell Spreading
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
A model of multicellular systems with several types of cells is developed from the phase field model. The model is presented as a set of partial differential equations of the field variables, each of which expresses the shape of one cell.…
The excitation of many cells and tissues is associated with cell mechanical changes. The evidence presented herein corroborates that single cells deform during an action potential (AP). It is demonstrated that excitation of plant cells…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
Recent evidence suggests that nongenetic (epigenetic) mechanisms play an important role at all stages of cancer evolution. In many cancers, these mechanisms have been observed to induce dynamic switching between two or more cell states,…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
The dispersal of cells from an initially constrained location is a crucial aspect of many physiological phenomena ranging from morphogenesis to tumour spreading. In such processes, the way cell-cell interactions impact the motion of single…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
During the morphogenesis of tissues and tumors, cells often interact with neighbors with different mechanical properties, but the understanding of its role is lacking. We use active Brownian Dynamics simulations to study a model co-culture…
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,…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
In proliferating epithelia of mammalian skin, cells of irregular polygonal-like shapes pack into complex nearly flat two-dimensional structures that are pliable to deformations. In this work, we employ various sensitive correlation…
Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
During epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), epithelial cells change their morphology, disperse, and gain mesenchymal-like characteristics. Usually, cells are categorized into discrete cell types or states based on gene expression and…
Cell layers eliminate unwanted cells through the extrusion process, which underlines healthy versus flawed tissue behaviors. Although several biochemical pathways have been identified, the underlying mechanical basis including the forces…
In this paper, we use the cell dynamics method to study the dynamics of phase transformation when three phases exist. The system we study is a two-dimensional system. The system is able to achieve three phases coexistence, which for…