Tight coupling between biochemical and mechanical properties of the actin cytoskeleton
drives a large range of cellular processes including polarity establishment, morphogenesis …

The remarkable processes that characterize living organisms, such as motility, self-healing
and reproduction, are fuelled by a continuous injection of energy at the microscale. The field …

Cells and organelles are delimited by lipid bilayers in which high deformability is essential to
many cell processes, including motility, endocytosis and cell division. Membrane tension is …

The mechanical behaviour of cells is largely controlled by a structure that is fundamentally
out of thermodynamic equilibrium: a network of crosslinked filaments subjected to the action …

Actomyosin-mediated contractility is a highly conserved mechanism for generating
mechanical stress in animal cells and underlies muscle contraction, cell migration, cell …

Cells exert, sense, and respond to physical forces through an astounding diversity of
mechanisms. Here we review recently developed tools to quantify the forces generated by …

The cortex is a thin, crosslinked actin network lying immediately beneath the plasma
membrane of animal cells. Myosin motors exert contractile forces in the meshwork. Because …

Precisely controlled cell deformations are key to cell migration, division and tissue
morphogenesis, and have been implicated in cell differentiation during development, as well …

Animal cell shape is largely determined by the cortex, a thin actin network underlying the
plasma membrane in which myosin-driven stresses generate contractile tension. Tension …

Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow,
reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic …