Image Theses and Dissertations A Computational Model of Cell Spreading, Movement, and Alignment on Micro-Wavy Surfaces Mechanical behavior of cells plays a crucial role in response to external stimuli and environment. It is very important to elucidate the mechanisms of cellular activities like spreading and alignment as it would shed light on further biological concepts. A multi-scale computational approach is adopted by modeling the cytoskeleton of cell as a tensegrity structure. The model is based on the complementary force balance between the tension and compression elements, resembling the internal structure of cell cytoskeleton composed of microtubules and actin filaments. View Item
Image Theses and Dissertations Exploring the Energetics of Cell Movement via Finite Element Analysis Two different cytoskeleton architectures corresponding to the mesenchymal cell and the fibroblast cell, are proposed in this work. They are subsequently modelled by Finite Elements in ANSYS APDL and are tested in two different constraint cases: polarized and unpolarized. Polarization in the context of this work is when the cell disintegrates all its focal adhesions except the ones at the leading edge and the tail edge. The opposite of a polarized cell is defined as an unpolarized cell, which has all the focal adhesions intact. View Item