papers

Publications (36)

physics.bio-ph2026

Cell-Cell Adhesion as a Double-Edged Sword in Tissue Fluidity

Anh Q. Nguyen, Pradip K. Bera, Jacob Notbohm +1

Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is know…

cond-mat.soft2023

Cell Division and Motility Enable Hexatic Order in Biological Tissues

Yiwen Tang, Siyuan Chen, Mark J. Bowick +1

Biological tissues transform between solid-like and liquid-like states in many fundamental physiological events. Recent experimental observations further suggest that in two-dimens…

cond-mat.soft2008

Why Do Granular Materials Stiffen with Shear Rate? A Test of Novel Stress-Based Statistics

Robert P. Behringer, Dapeng Bi, Bulbul Chakraborty +2

Recent experiments exhibit a rate-dependence for granular shear such that the stress grows linearly in the logarithm of the shear rate, \dotγ. Assuming a generalized activated pro…

cond-mat.stat-mech2014

The Statistical Physics of Athermal Materials

Dapeng Bi, Silke Henkes, Karen E. Daniels +1

At the core of equilibrium statistical mechanics lies the notion of statistical ensembles: a collection of microstates, each occurring with a given a priori probability that depend…

physics.bio-ph2017

Universal geometric constraints during epithelial jamming

Lior Atia, Dapeng Bi, Yasha Sharma +14

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, wh…

physics.bio-ph2016

Motility-driven glass and jamming transitions in biological tissues

Dapeng Bi, Xingbo Yang, M. Cristina Marchetti +1

Cell motion inside dense tissues governs many biological processes, including embryonic development and cancer metastasis, and recent experiments suggest that these tissues exhibit…

cond-mat.soft2017

Flocking Transition in Confluent Tissues

Fabio Giavazzi, Matteo Paoluzzi, Marta Macchi +5

Collective cell migration underlies important biological processes, such as embryonic development, wound healing and cancer invasion. While many aspects of single cell movements ar…

physics.bio-ph2026

Shape-Independent Fluidization in Epithelial Cell Monolayers

Pradip K. Bera, Anh Q. Nguyen, Molly McCord +2

Tissue fluidity regulates many critical biological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In confluent epithelia, where cell packing frac…

cond-mat.soft2017

Hydrodynamics of shape-driven rigidity transitions in motile tissues

Michael Czajkowski, Dapeng Bi, M. Lisa Manning +1

In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and…

cond-mat.dis-nn2024

Tunable Hyperuniformity in Cellular Structures

Yiwen Tang, Xinzhi Li, Dapeng Bi

Hyperuniform materials, characterized by their suppressed density fluctuations and vanishing structure factors as the wave number approaches zero, represent a unique state of matte…

cond-mat.soft2024

Multicell-Fold: geometric learning in folding multicellular life

Haiqian Yang, Anh Q. Nguyen, Dapeng Bi +2

During developmental processes such as embryogenesis, how a group of cells fold into specific structures, is a central question in biology that defines how living organisms form. E…

cond-mat.soft2024

A shape-driven reentrant jamming transition in confluent monolayers of synthetic cell-mimics

Pragya Arora, Souvik Sadhukhan, Saroj Kumar Nandi +3

Many critical biological processes, like wound healing, require confluent cell monolayers/bulk tissues to transition from a jammed solid-like to a fluid-like state. Although numeri…

cond-mat.soft2013

Fluctuations in Shear-Jammed States: A Statistical Ensemble Approach

Dapeng Bi, Jie Zhang, R. P. Behringer +1

Granular matter exists out of thermal equilibrium, i.e. it is athermal. While conventional equilibrium statistical mechanics is not useful for characterizing granular materials, th…

cond-mat.soft2023

Network physics of attractive colloidal gels: Resilience, Rigidity, and Phase Diagram

Mohammad Nabizadeh, Farzaneh Nasirian, Xinzhi Li +6

Attractive colloidal gels exhibit solid-like behavior at vanishingly small fractions of solids, owing to ramified space-spanning networks that form due to particle-particle interac…

cond-mat.soft2023

A Mechanistic Model of the Organization of Cell Shapes in Epithelial Tissues

Kanaya Malakar, Rafael I. Rubenstein, Dapeng Bi +1

The organization of cells within tissues plays a vital role in various biological processes, including development and morphogenesis. As a result, understanding how cells self-orga…

cond-mat.soft2009

Rheology of Granular Materials: Dynamics in a Stress Landscape

Dapeng Bi, Bulbul Chakraborty

We present a framework for analyzing the rheology of dense driven granular materials, based on a recent proposal of a stress-based ensemble. In this ensemble fluctuations in a gran…

physics.bio-ph2025

Origin of yield stress and mechanical plasticity in model biological tissues

Anh Q. Nguyen, Junxiang Huang, Dapeng Bi

During development and under normal physiological conditions, biological tissues are continuously subjected to substantial mechanical stresses. In response to large deformations ce…

cond-mat.soft2023

Ductile-to-brittle transition and yielding in soft amorphous materials: perspectives and open questions

Thibaut Divoux, Elisabeth Agoritsas, Stefano Aime +37

Soft amorphous materials are viscoelastic solids ubiquitously found around us, from clays and cementitious pastes to emulsions and physical gels encountered in food or biomedical e…

physics.bio-ph2015

A density-independent glass transition in biological tissues

Dapeng Bi, J. H. Lopez, J. M. Schwarz +1

Cell migration is important in many biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly…

cond-mat.soft2014

Energy barriers govern glassy dynamics in tissues

Dapeng Bi, J. H. Lopez, J. M. Schwarz +1

Recent observations demonstrate that densely packed tissues exhibit features of glassy dynamics, such as caging behavior and dynamical heterogeneities, although it has remained unc…

cond-mat.soft2017

Correlating Cell Shape and Cellular Stress in Motile Confluent Tissues

Xingbo Yang, Dapeng Bi, Michael Czajkowski +3

Collective cell migration is a highly regulated process involved in wound healing, cancer metastasis and morphogenesis. Mechanical interactions among cells provide an important reg…

cond-mat.soft2023

Spatial Confinement Affects the Heterogeneity and Interactions Between Shoaling Fish

Gabriel Kuntz, Junxiang Huang, Mitchell Rask +4

Living objects are able to consume chemical energy and process information independently from others. However, living objects can coordinate to form ordered groups such as schools…

physics.bio-ph2019

Mechanical heterogeneity in tissues promotes rigidity and controls cellular invasion

Xinzhi Li, Amit Das, Dapeng Bi

We study the influence of cell-level mechanical heterogeneity in epithelial tissues using a vertex-based model. Heterogeneity in single cell stiffness is introduced as a quenched r…

cond-mat.soft2023

Bridging the Gap Between Collective Motility and Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transitions through the Active Finite Voronoi Model

Junxiang Huang, Herbert Levine, Dapeng Bi

We introduce an active version of the recently proposed finite Voronoi model of epithelial tissue. The resultant Active Finite Voronoi (AFV) model enables the study of both conflue…

cond-mat.soft2023

Discontinuous rigidity transition associated with shear jamming in granular simulations

Varghese Babu, H. A Vinutha, Dapeng Bi +1

We investigate the rigidity transition associated with shear jamming in frictionless, as well as frictional, disk packings in the quasi-static regime and at low shear rates. For fr…

physics.bio-ph2018

Cooperation of dual modes of cell motility promotes epithelial stress relaxation to accelerate wound healing

Michael F. Staddon, Dapeng Bi, A. Pasha Tabatabai +3

Collective cell migration in cohesive units is vital for tissue morphogenesis, wound repair, and immune response. While the fundamental driving forces for collective cell motion st…

physics.bio-ph2018

Epithelial Wound Healing Coordinates Distinct Actin Network Architectures to Conserve Mechanical Work and Balance Power

Visar Ajeti, A. Pasha Tabatabai, Andrew J. Fleszar +8

How cells with diverse morphologies and cytoskeletal architectures modulate their mechanical behaviors to drive robust collective motion within tissues is poorly understood. During…

physics.bio-ph2025

Epithelial layer fluidization by curvature-induced unjamming

Margherita De Marzio, Amit Das, Jeffrey J. Fredberg +1

The transition of an epithelial layer from a stationary, quiescent state to a highly migratory, dynamic state is required for wound healing, development, and regeneration. This tra…

cond-mat.soft2013

Origin of Rigidity in Dry Granular Solids

Sumantra Sarkar, Dapeng Bi, Jie Zhang +2

Solids are distinguished from fluids by their ability to resist shear. In traditional solids, the resistance to shear is associated with the emergence of broken translational symme…

cond-mat.soft2018

A biological tissue-inspired tunable photonic fluid

Xinzhi Li, Amit Das, Dapeng Bi

Inspired by how cells pack in dense biological tissues, we design 2D and 3D amorphous materials which possess a complete photonic band gap. A physical parameter based on how cells…

cond-mat.soft2020

Controlled neighbor exchanges drive glassy behavior, intermittency and cell streaming in epithelial tissues

Amit Das, Srikanth Sastry, Dapeng Bi

Cell neighbor exchanges are integral to tissue rearrangements in biology, including development and repair. Often these processes occur via topological T1 transitions analogous to…

cond-mat.soft2023

Constitutive model for the rheology of biological tissue

Suzanne M. Fielding, James O. Cochran, Junxiang Huang +2

The rheology of biological tissue is key to processes such as embryo development, wound healing and cancer metastasis. Vertex models of confluent tissue monolayers have uncovered a…

cond-mat.soft2024

Discontinuous shear thickening in biological tissue rheology

Michael J. Hertaeg, Suzanne M. Fielding, Dapeng Bi

During embryonic morphogenesis, tissues undergo dramatic deformations in order to form functional organs. Similarly, in adult animals, living cells and tissues are continually subj…

cond-mat.soft2022

Shear-driven solidification and nonlinear elasticity in epithelial tissues

Junxiang Huang, James O. Cochran, Suzanne M. Fielding +2

Biological processes, from morphogenesis to tumor invasion, spontaneously generate shear stresses inside living tissue. The mechanisms that govern the transmission of mechanical fo…

physics.bio-ph2019

Multicellular rosettes drive fluid-solid transition in epithelial tissues

Le Yan, Dapeng Bi

Models for confluent biological tissues often describe the network formed by cells as a triple-junction network, similar to foams. However, higher order vertices or multicellular r…

cond-mat.soft2017

Shear-induced rigidity of frictional particles: Analysis of emergent order in stress space

Sumantra Sarkar, Dapeng Bi, Jie Zhang +3

Solids are distinguished from fluids by their ability to resist shear. In traditional solids, the resistance to shear is associated with the emergence of broken translational symme…