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Modes of mechanical guidance of adhesion-independent cell migration Open
A phase-field model reveals how contractile surface instabilities drive adhesion-independent cell migration, showing that active surface dynamics enable directed movement and stimulus-specific behaviours in confined environments.
Modes of Mechanical Guidance of Adhesion-Independent Cell Migration Open
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating...
Discontinuous transition to active nematic turbulence Open
Active fluids exhibit chaotic flows at low Reynolds number known as active turbulence. Whereas the statistical properties of the chaotic flows are increasingly well understood, the nature of the transition from laminar to turbulent flows a…
A mechanical origin for implantation defects in embryos from aged females Open
Women over 35 experience a marked reduction in fertility. The origin of these fertility defects appears to reside in the implantation capacity of the embryo itself, but the mechanistic basis of this impairment is not well-understood. Here,…
View article: General Hamiltonian description of nonreciprocal interactions
General Hamiltonian description of nonreciprocal interactions Open
In a vast class of systems, which includes members as diverse as active colloids and bird flocks, interactions do not stem from a potential, and are in general nonreciprocal. Thus, it is not possible to define a conventional energy functio…
Discontinuous transition to active nematic turbulence Open
Active fluids exhibit chaotic flows at low Reynolds number known as active turbulence. Whereas the statistical properties of the chaotic flows are increasingly well understood, the nature of the transition from laminar to turbulent flows a…
Lattice-dependent orientational order in active crystals Open
Crystals made of active particles that turn either toward or away from each other achieve states with orientational order that depends on the underlying crystalline lattice.
Buckling by disordered growth Open
Buckling instabilities driven by tissue growth underpin key developmental events such as the folding of the brain. Tissue growth is disordered due to cell-to-cell variability, but the effects of this variability on buckling are unknown. He…
Active Screws: Emergent Active Chiral Nematics of Spinning Self-Propelled Rods Open
Several types of active agents self-propel by spinning around their propulsion axis, thus behaving as active screws. Examples include cytoskeletal filaments in gliding assays, magnetically-driven colloidal helices, and microorganisms like …
Flocking by Turning Away Open
Flocking, as paradigmatically exemplified by birds, is the coherent collective motion of active agents. As originally conceived, flocking emerges through alignment interactions between the agents. Here, we report that flocking can also eme…
Capillary interactions drive the self-organization of bacterial colonies Open
Many bacteria inhabit thin layers of water on solid surfaces both naturally in soils or on hosts or textiles and in the lab on agar hydrogels. In these environments, cells experience capillary forces, yet an understanding of how these forc…
Nonlinear spontaneous flow instability in active nematics Open
Active nematics exhibit spontaneous flows through a well-known linear instability of the uniformly-aligned quiescent state. Here we show that even a linearly stable uniform state can experience a nonlinear instability, resulting in a disco…
Flocking by Turning Away Open
Flocking, as paradigmatically exemplified by birds, is the coherent collective motion of active agents. As originally conceived, flocking emerges through alignment interactions between the agents. Here, we report that flocking can also eme…
Optogenetic generation of leader cells reveals a force-velocity relation for collective cell migration Open
The front of migratory cellular clusters during development, wound healing and cancer invasion is typically populated with highly protrusive cells that are called leader cells. Leader cells are thought to physically pull and direct their c…
Local polar order controls mechanical stress and triggers layer formation in developing Myxococcus xanthus colonies Open
Colonies of the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus go through a morphological transition from a thin colony of cells to three-dimensional droplet-like fruiting bodies as a strategy to survive starvation. The biological pathways that contr…
Frictiotaxis underlies adhesion-independent durotaxis Open
Cells move directionally along gradients of substrate stiffness, a process called durotaxis. The current consensus is that durotaxis relies on cell-substrate focal adhesions to sense stiffness and transmit forces that drive directed motion…
View article: Stiffness-dependent active wetting enables optimal collective cell durotaxis
Stiffness-dependent active wetting enables optimal collective cell durotaxis Open
The directed migration of cellular clusters enables morphogenesis, wound healing, and collective cancer invasion. Gradients of substrate stiffness are known to direct the migration of cellular clusters in a process called collective durota…
Self-assembly of tessellated tissue sheets by expansion and collision Open
Tissues do not exist in isolation—they interact with other tissues within and across organs. While cell-cell interactions have been intensely investigated, less is known about tissue-tissue interactions. Here, we studied collisions between…
Fingering instability of active nematic droplets Open
From the mitotic spindle up to tissues and biofilms, many biological systems behave as active droplets, which often break symmetry and change shape spontaneously. Here, I show that active nematic droplets can experience a fingering instabi…
Cellular Sensing Governs the Stability of Chemotactic Fronts Open
In contexts ranging from embryonic development to bacterial ecology, cell populations migrate chemotactically along self-generated chemical gradients, often forming a propagating front. Here, we theoretically show that the stability of suc…
Fingering Instability of Active Nematic Droplets Open
From the mitotic spindle up to tissues and biofilms, many biological systems behave as active droplets, which often break symmetry and change shape spontaneously. Here, I show that active nematic droplets can experience a fingering instabi…
Collective durotaxis of cohesive cell clusters on a stiffness gradient Open
Many types of motile cells perform durotaxis, namely directed migration following gradients of substrate stiffness. Recent experiments have revealed that cell monolayers can migrate toward stiffer regions even when individual cells do not—…
Author response: Chemotactic smoothing of collective migration Open
Article Figures and data Abstract Editor's evaluation eLife digest Introduction Results Discussion Materials and methods Data availability References Decision letter Author response Article and author information Metrics Abstract Collectiv…
Active Turbulence Open
Active fluids exhibit spontaneous flows with complex spatiotemporal structure, which have been observed in bacterial suspensions, sperm cells, cytoskeletal suspensions, self-propelled colloids, and cell tissues. Despite occurring in the ab…
Curvature induces active velocity waves in rotating multicellular\n spheroids Open
The multicellular organization of diverse systems, such as embryos,\nintestines and tumours, relies on the coordinated migration of cells in 3D\ncurved environments. In these settings, cells establish supracellular patterns\nof motion, inc…