相关论文: Contractile stresses in cohesive cell layers on fi…
Tuning of active prestress e.g. through activity of molecular motors constitutes a powerful cellular tool to adjust cellular stiffness through nonlinear material properties. Understanding this tool is an important prerequisite for our…
Gels are used to design bilayered structures with high residual stresses. The swelling of a thin layer on a compliant substrate leads to compressive stresses. The post-buckling of this layer is investigated experimentally; the wavelengths…
Tissues are characterized by layers of functional units such as cells and extracellular matrix (ECM). Nevertheless, how dynamics at interlayer interfaces help transmit cellular forces in tissues remains overlooked. Here, we investigate a…
Cell spreading and motility on an adhesive substrate are driven by the active physical forces generated by the actin cytoskeleton. We have recently shown that coupling curved membrane complexes to protrusive forces, exerted by the actin…
Cell cell and cell matrix adhesions are fundamental in all multicellular organisms. They play a key role in cellular growth, differentiation, pattern formation and migration. Cell-cell adhesion is substantial in the immune response,…
Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…
Understanding how cells escape from embedded spheroids requires a mechanical framework linking stress generation within cells, across cells, and between cells and the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM). We develop such a framework by…
Tissue growth kinetics and interface dynamics depend on the properties of the tissue environment and cell-cell interactions. In cellular environments, substrate heterogeneity and geometry arise from a variety factors, such as the structure…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
We investigate the geometrical and mechanical properties of adherent cells characterized by a highly anisotropic actin cytoskeleton. Using a combination of theoretical work and experiments on micropillar arrays, we demonstrate that the…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
Based on a potential theoretical approach, the subsurface stress field is calculated for an elastic-half space, which is subject to normal and uniaxial tangential surface tractions that - in the case of elastic decoupling - correspond to…
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…
Cell--cell and cell-matrix adhesions play essential roles in the function of tissues. There is growing evidence for the importance of crosstalk between these two adhesion types, yet little is known about the impact of these interactions on…
The mechanical properties of the cell depend crucially on the tension of its cytoskeleton, a biopolymer network that is put under stress by active motor proteins. While the fibrous nature of the network is known to strongly affect the…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
Contractile forces exerted on the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM) lead to the alignment and stretching of constituent fibers within the vicinity of cells. As a consequence, the matrix reorganizes to form thick bundles of aligned…
Collective cell migration is a highly regulated process involved in wound healing, cancer metastasis and morphogenesis. Mechanical interactions among cells provide an important regulatory mechanism to coordinate such collective motion.…
The magnitude of traction forces exerted by living animal cells on their environment is a monotonically increasing and approximately sigmoidal function of the stiffness of the external medium. This observation is rationalized using active…
Contractile cytoskeletal structures such as fine actomyosin meshworks and stress fibers are essential force-generators for mechanical phenomena in live cells, including motility, morphogenesis, and mechanosensing. While there have been many…