The origin of fracture in epithelial cell sheets subject to stretch is commonly attributed to excess tension in the cells' cytoskeleton, in the plasma membrane, or in cell-cell contacts. Here, we demonstrate that for a ...

The animal body is fundamentally made of water. A small fraction of this water is freely flowing in blood and lymph, but most of it is trapped in hydrogels such as the extracellular matrix (ECM), the cytoskeleton, and ...

n a previous work, we have shown that a spatially localized transmembrane pH gradient, produced by acid micro-injection near the external side of cardiolipin-containing giant unilamellar vesicles, leads to the formation ...

The function of organs such as lungs, kidneys and mammary glands relies on the three-dimensional geometry of their epithelium. To adopt shapes such as spheres, tubes and ellipsoids, epithelia generate mechanical stresses ...

Intestinal organoids capture essential features of the intestinal epithelium such as crypt folding, cellular compartmentalization and collective movements. Each of these processes and their coordination require patterned ...

Tubular structures made of elastic helical fibers are widely found in nature and in technology. The complex and highly nonlinear mechanical properties of such assemblies have been understood either through minimal models ...

Collective variables (CVs) are low-dimensional representations of the state of a complex system, which help us rationalize molecular conformations and sample free energy landscapes with molecular dynamics simulations. Given ...

We discuss some recent results on biological and bio-inspired morphing, and use them to identify promising research directions for the future. In particular, we consider issues related to morphing at microscopic scales ...

Calculations on general point-set surfaces are attractive because of their flexibility and simplicity in the preprocessing but present important challenges. The absence of a mesh makes it nontrivial to decide if two ...