Related papers: Chemotactic Collapse and Mesenchymal Morphogenesis
A detailed understanding of the interface between living cells and substrate materials is of rising importance in many fields of medicine, biology and biotechnology. Cells at interfaces often form epithelia. The physical barrier that they…
Mathematical models have been widely used to describe the collective movement of bacteria by chemotaxis. In particular, bacterial concentration waves traveling in a narrow channel have been experimentally observed and can be precisely…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
A discrete chemotactic predator-prey model is proposed in which the prey secrets a diffusing chemical which is sensed by the predator and vice versa. Two dynamical states corresponding to catching and escaping are identified and it is shown…
We provide a minimal continuum model for mesoscale plasticity, explaining the cellular dislocation structures observed in deformed crystals. Our dislocation density tensor evolves from random, smooth initial conditions to form self-similar…
Bacteria are easily characterizable model organisms with an impressively complicated set of capabilities. Among their capabilities is quorum sensing, a detailed cell-cell signaling system that may have a common origin with eukaryotic…
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a highly complex structure through which biochemical and mechanical signals are transmitted. In processes of cell migration, the ECM also acts as a scaffold, providing structural support to cells as well as…
It is known that the orientation of cellulose microfibrils within plant cell walls has an important impact on the morphogenesis of plant cells and tissues. Viewing the shape of a plant cell as a square prism or cylinder with the axis…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
We develop and analyse a discrete, one-dimensional model of cell motility which incorporates the effects of volume filling, cell-to-cell adhesion and chemotaxis. The formal continuum limit of the model is a nonlinear generalisation of the…
A continuum model of epithelial tissue mechanics was formulated using cellular-level mechanical ingredients and cell morphogenetic processes, including cellular shape changes and cellular rearrangements. This model can include finite…
Cell migration is a fundamental process involved in physiological phenomena such as the immune response and morphogenesis, but also in pathological processes, such as the development of tumor metastasis. These functions are effectively…
Microorganisms can preferentially orient and move along gradients of a chemo-attractant (i.e., chemotax) while colonies of many microorganisms can collectively undergo complex dynamics in response to chemo-attractants that they themselves…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
It is increasingly being realized that liquid-crystalline features can play an important role in the properties and dynamics of cell monolayers. Here, we present a cell-based model of cell layers, based on the phase-field formulation, that…
Escherichia coli is a motile bacterium that moves up a chemoattractant gradient by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating runs and tumbles. This paper presents calculations of the chemotactic drift velocity vd (the mean…
The Keller-Segel system has been widely proposed as a model for bacterial waves driven by chemotactic processes. Current experiments on {\em E. coli} have shown precise structure of traveling pulses. We present here an alternative…
The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
Chemotaxis-driven invasions have been proposed across a broad spectrum of biological processes, from cancer to ecology. The influential system of equations introduced by Keller and Segel has proven a popular choice in the modelling of such…