相关论文: Growth, collapse, and stalling in a mechanical mod…

Biological systems tightly regulate their physiological state using control signals. This includes the actomyosin cytoskeleton, a contractile active gel that consumes chemical free energy to drive many examples of cellular mechanical…

We study a continuum model of an extensile active nematic to show that mesoscale turbulence develops in two stages: (i) ordered regions undergo an intrinsic hydrodynamic instability generating walls, lines of stong bend deformations, (ii)…

Active matter is naturally out of equilibrium which results in the emergence of diverse dynamic steady states, including the omnipresent chaotic state known as the active turbulence. However, much less is known how active systems…

The microtubule cytoskeleton is responsible for sustained, long-range intracellular transport of mRNAs, proteins, and organelles in neurons. Neuronal microtubules must be stable enough to ensure reliable transport, but they also undergo…

The cellular cytoskeleton is an active material, driven out of equilibrium by molecular motor proteins. It is not understood how the collective behaviors of cytoskeletal networks emerge from the properties of the network's constituent motor…

We present investigations on volume regulation and beading shape transitions in PC12 neurites conducted using a flow-chamber technique. By disrupting the cell cytoskeleton with specific drugs we investigate the role of its individual…

We study a mixture of extensile and contractile cells using a vertex model extended to include active nematic stresses. The two cell populations phase separate over time. While phase separation strengthens monotonically with an increasing…

Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of an electro-mechanical effect in many biological tissues and hydrogels, and its actual influence on growth, migration, and pattern formation. Here, to model these interactions and…

How can a collection of motile cells, each generating contractile nematic stresses in isolation, become an extensile nematic at the tissue-level? Understanding this seemingly contradictory experimental observation, which occurs irrespective…

Colloidal gels are formed through the aggregation of attractive particles, whose size ranges from 10~nm to a few micrometers, suspended in a liquid. Such gels are ubiquitous in everyday life applications, from food products to paints or…

With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…

Homogeneous nucleation, a textbook transition path for phase transitions, is typically understood on thermodynamic grounds through the prism of classical nucleation theory. However, recent studies have suggested the applicability of…

We study analytically and numerically a generic continuum model of an isotropic active solid with internal stresses generated by non-equilibrium `active' mechano-chemical reactions. Our analysis shows that the gel can be tuned through three…

The loss of plasticity in learning agents, analogous to the solidification of neural pathways in biological brains, significantly impedes learning and adaptation in reinforcement learning due to its non-stationary nature. To address this…

We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…

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 interplay between cytoskeletal architecture and the nonlinearity of the interactions due to bucklable filaments plays a key role in modulating the cell's mechanical stability and affecting its structural rearrangements. We study a model…

We propose a class of microstructurally informed models for the linear elastic mechanical behavior of cross-linked polymer networks such as the actin cytoskeleton. Salient features of the models include the possibility to represent…

Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…

Self organization mechanisms are essential for the cytoskeleton to adapt to the requirements of living cells. They rely on the intricate interplay of cytoskeletal filaments, crosslinking proteins and molecular motors. Here we present an in…