Carles Blanch-Mercader

• PhD Physics
• Chargé du recherche at Institut Curie

Living systems are composed of discrete units, assembled through a hierarchy of structures, and active, by locally extracting energy from their environment to produce mechanical work. Hydrodynamic theories have been successfully applied to describe the large scale dynamics of active materials. Yet, the hydrodynamic limit requires a separation of sc...

Orientational order is a common feature of many biological and synthetic materials. Topological defects are discontinuities in this order that are often coupled to geometric features of the materials. Here, we study the equilibrium shapes of fluid membranes featuring a +1 topological defect as a model for morphogenesis. We show, through simulation...

Collective cell migration is key during development, wound healing and metastasis and relies on coordinated cell behaviors at the group level. Src kinase is a key signalling protein for physiological...

Suspension of particles in a fluid solvent are ubiquitous in nature, for example, water mixed with sugar or bacteria self-propelling through mucus. Particles create local flow perturbations that can modify drastically the effective (homogenized) bulk properties of the fluid. Understanding the link between the properties of particles and the fluid s...

Collective cell migration is key during development, wound healing and metastasis and relies on coordinated cell behaviors at the group level. Src kinase is a signalling enzyme regulating many cellular processes including adhesion and motility and its deregulated activation has been associated to aggressiveness of different cancers. Here, we take a...

Directed collective cell migration is central in morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer progression1,2. Although it is well-accepted that the molecular anisotropy of the micro-environment guides this migration3,4, its impact on the pattern of the cell flows remains largely unexplored. Studying confluent human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs) in...

Directed collective cell migration is central to morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer progression. Although the molecular anisotropy of the microenvironment guides this migration, its impact on cell flow patterns remains unexplored. Here we show that subcellular microgrooves elicit a polar mode of collective migration in bidirectional lanes, who...

Topological defects in active polar fluids can organize spontaneous flows and influence macroscopic density patterns. Both of them play an important role during animal development. Yet the influence of density on active flows is poorly understood. Motivated by experiments on cell monolayers confined to disks, we study the coupling between density a...

During the consumption of alkanes, Alcanivorax borkumensis will form a biofilm around an oil droplet, but the role this plays during degradation remains unclear. We identified a shift in biofilm morphology that depends on adaptation to oil consumption: Longer exposure leads to the appearance of dendritic biofilms optimized for oil consumption effec...

Topological defects in active polar fluids can organise spontaneous flows and influence macroscopic density patterns. Both of them play, for example, an important role during animal development. Yet the influence of density on active flows is poorly understood. Motivated by experiments on cell monolayers confined to discs, we study the coupling bet...

Hydrostatic skeletons such as the Hydra’s consist of two stacked layers of muscle cells perpendicularly oriented. In vivo, these bilayers first assemble, and then the muscle fibers of both layers develop and organize with this crisscross orientation. In the present work, we identify an alternative mechanism of crisscross bilayering of myoblasts in...

Collectively migrating cells in living organisms are often guided by their local environment, including physical barriers and internal interfaces. Well-controlled in vitro experiments have shown that, when confined in adhesive stripes, monolayers of moderately active spindle-shaped cells self-organize at well-defined angle to the stripes’ longitudi...

Three-dimensional collective epithelial rotation around a given axis represents a coordinated cellular movement driving tissue morphogenesis and transformation. Questions regarding these behaviors and their relationship with substrate curvatures are intimately linked to spontaneous active matter processes and to vital morphogenetic and embryonic pr...

Alcanivorax borkumensis are prominent actors in oil spill bioremediation; however, the interfacial dynamics of their biofilms and its role in oil degradation remain unclear. Longitudinal tracking of biofilm-covered oil microdroplets using microfluidics reveals a spontaneous morphological transition from a thick biofilm phenotype to a thin dendritic...

Morphogenesis requires spatiotemporal regulation of proliferation, both by biochemical and mechanical cues. In epithelia, this regulation is called contact inhibition of proliferation, but disentangling biochemical from mechanical cues remains challenging. Here, we show that epithelia growing under confinement accumulate pressure that inhibits prol...

Tissues acquire function and shape via differentiation and morphogenesis. Both processes are driven by coordinating cellular forces and shapes at the tissue scale, but general principles governing this interplay remain to be discovered. Here we report that self-organization of myoblasts around integer topological defects, namely spirals and asters,...

Generation of tissue curvature is essential to morphogenesis. However, how cells adapt to changing curvature is still unknown because tools to dynamically control curvature in vitro are lacking. Here, we developed self-rolling substrates to study how flat epithelial cell monolayers adapt to a rapid anisotropic change of curvature. We show that the...

Simple hydrostatic skeletons such as the Hydra’s consist of two stacked layers of cells perpendicularly oriented. Although this crisscross architecture can be recapitulated in vitro, little is known on the formation of such multilayers starting from a monolayer. In the present article, we show that bilayering of myoblasts results from the organizat...

Morphogenesis requires spatiotemporal regulation of cell shape and proliferation, both regulated by biochemical and mechanical cues. In epithelia, this regulation is called contact inhibition, but disentangling biochemical from mechanical cues remains challenging. Here, we show that epithelia growing under confinement accumulate pressure that inhib...

In developing organisms, internal cellular processes generate mechanical stresses at the tissue scale. The resulting deformations depend on the material properties of the tissue, which can exhibit long-ranged orientational order and topological defects. It remains a challenge to determine these properties on the time scales relevant for development...

Monolayers of anisotropic cells exhibit long-ranged orientational order and topological defects. During the development of organisms, orientational order often influences morphogenetic events. However, the linkage between the mechanics of cell monolayers and topological defects remains largely unexplored. This holds specifically at the timescales r...

Generation of tissue curvature is essential to morphogenesis. However, how cells adapt to changing curvature is still unknown because tools to dynamically control curvature in vitro are lacking. Here we developed self-rolling substrates to study how flat epithelial cell monolayers adapt to a rapid, anisotropic change of curvature. We show that the...

During metastatic dissemination, streams of cells collectively migrate through a network of narrow channels within the extracellular matrix, before entering into the blood stream. This strategy is believed to outperform other migration modes, based on the observation that individual cancer cells can take advantage of confinement to switch to an adh...

Many organs are formed through folding of an epithelium. This change in shape is usually attributed to tissue heterogeneities, for example, local apical contraction. In contrast, compressive stresses have been proposed to fold a homogeneous epithelium by buckling. While buckling is an appealing mechanism, demonstrating that it underlies folding req...

In developing organisms, internal cellular processes generate mechanical stresses at the tissue scale. The resulting deformations depend on the material properties of the tissue, which can exhibit long-ranged orientational order and topological defects. It remains a challenge to determine these properties on the time scales relevant for development...

Monolayers of anisotropic cells exhibit long-ranged orientational order and topological defects. During the development of organisms, orientational order often influences morphogenetic events. However, the linkage between the mechanics of cell monolayers and topological defects remains largely unexplored. This holds specifically at the time scales...

Tissues acquire their function and shape via differentiation and morphogenesis. Both processes are driven by coordinating cellular forces and shapes at the tissue scale, but general principles governing this interplay remain to be discovered. Here, we report that self-organization of myoblasts around integer topological defects, namely spirals and...

Brownian ratchets are shown to feature a nontrivial vanishing-noise limit where the dynamics is reduced to a stochastic alternation between two deterministic circle maps (quasi-deterministic ratchets). Motivated by cooperative dynamics of molecular motors, here we solve exactly the problem of two interacting quasi-deterministic ratchets. We show th...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Significance Cellular functions rely on small groups of molecular motors to transport their cargoes throughout the cell along polar filaments of the cytoskeleton. Cytoskeletal filaments self-assemble into dense networks comprising intersections and filaments of mixed polarity, challenging directed motor-based transport. Using micropatterns of actin...

The migration of immune cells can be guided by physical cues imposed by the environment, such as geometry, rigidity, or hydraulic resistance (HR). Neutrophils preferentially follow paths of least HR in vitro, a phenomenon known as barotaxis. The mechanisms and physiological relevance of barotaxis remain unclear. We show that barotaxis results from...

During the spreading of epithelial tissues, the advancing tissue front often develops fingerlike protrusions. Their resemblance to traditional viscous fingering patterns in driven fluids suggests that epithelial fingers could arise from an interfacial instability. However, the existence and physical mechanism of such a putative instability remain u...

During the spreading of epithelial tissues, the advancing tissue front often develops fingerlike protrusions. Their resemblance to traditional viscous fingering patterns in driven fluids suggests that epithelial fingers could arise from an interfacial instability. However, the existence and physical mechanism of such a putative instability remain u...

Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behavior of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this analogy are unclear, however, because the active cellular forces that drive tissue wetting have been neither measu...

Many organs, such as the gut or the spine are formed through folding of an epithelium. Whereas genetic regulation of epithelium folding has been investigated extensively, the nature of the mechanical forces driving this process remain largely unknown. Here we show that monolayers of identical cells proliferating on the inner surface of elastic sphe...

Cytoskeletal filaments assemble into dense parallel, antiparallel or disordered networks, providing a complex environment for active cargo transport and positioning by molecular motors. The interplay between the network architecture and intrinsic motor properties clearly affects transport properties but remains poorly understood. Here, by using sur...

Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behaviour of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this analogy are unclear, however, because the active cellular forces that drive tissue wetting have been neither meas...

We study the competition for space between two cell lines that differ only in the expression of the Ras oncogene. The two cell populations are initially separated and set to migrate antagonistically towards an in-between stripe of free substrate. After contact, their interface moves towards the population of normal cells. We interpret the velocity...

We study the competition for space between two cell lines that differ only in the expression of the Ras oncogene. The two cell populations are initially separated and set to migrate antagonistically towards an in-between stripe of free substrate. After contact, their interface moves towards the population of normal cells. We interpret the velocity...

Significance The migration of cellular populations drives influential and disparate biological processes, from the establishment of embryos to the invasion of cancerous tissues. Its deregulation can lead to improper development or pathogenesis of diseases. While many of the mechanisms that promote single-cell migration have been identified, how cel...

In embryonic development or tumour evolution, cells often migrate collectively within confining tracks defined by their microenvironment1,2. In some of these situations, the displacements within a cell strand are antiparallel³, giving rise to shear flows. However, the mechanisms underlying these spontaneous flows remain poorly understood. Here, we...

Supplementary material for "Turbulent Dynamics of Epithelial Cell Cultures" C. Blanch-Mercader, V. Yashunsky, S. Garcia, G. Duclos, L. Giomi, and P. Silberzan Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 208101

We investigate the large length and long time scales collective flows and structural rearrangements within in vitro human bronchial epithelial cell (HBEC) cultures. Activity-driven collective flows result in ensembles of vortices randomly positioned in space. By analyzing a large population of vortices, we show that their area follows an exponentia...

The migration of immune cells is guided by specific chemical signals, such as chemokine gradients. Their trajectories can also be diverted by physical cues and obstacles imposed by the cellular environment, such as topography, rigidity, adhesion, or hydraulic resistance. On the example of hydraulic resistance, it was shown that neutrophil preferent...

In vitro epithelial monolayers exhibit a rich repertoire of collective dynamical behaviours according to microenvironment mechanical features. We investigate the statistical and dynamical properties of human bronchial epithelial cell (HBEC) flows in bulk, by analysing their large length-scale and long time-scale spatiotemporal dynamics. Activity-dr...

Determining the structure and the internal dynamics of tissues is essential to understand their functional organization. Microscopy allows for monitoring positions and trajectories of every single cell. Those data are useful to extract statistical observables, such as intercellular distance, tissue symmetry and anisotropy, and cell motility. Howeve...

We present a hydrodynamic model of spreading epithelial monolayers as polar viscous fluids, with active contractility and traction on the substrate. The combination of both active forces generate an instability that leads to nonlinear traveling waves, which propagate in the direction of polarity with characteristic time scales that depend on contac...

Collective cell migration in spreading epithelia in controlled environments has become a landmark in our current understanding of fundamental biophysical processes in development, regeneration, wound healing or cancer. Epithelial monolayers are treated as thin layers of a viscous fluid that exert active traction forces on the substrate. The model i...

We study a generic two-state model for an assembly of molecular motors which is described by means of a pair of integro-partial differential equations and leads to oscillatory motion in the presence of an elastic coupling to its environment. We discuss a reduction of the system to a minimal set of three ordinary differential equations that successf...

We study and classify the time-dependent morphologies of polarized tissues subject to anisotropic but spatially homogeneous growth. Extending previous studies, we model the tissue as a fluid, and discuss the interplay of the active stresses generated by the anisotropic cell division and three types of passive mechanical forces: viscous stresses, fr...

We show that actin lamellar fragments driven solely by polymerization forces at the bounding membrane are generically motile when the circular symmetry is spontaneously broken, with no need of molecular motors or global polarization. We base our study on a nonlinear analysis of a recently introduced minimal model [Callan-Jones et al., Phys. Rev. Le...

We study the cooperative dynamics of Brownian motors moving along a one-dimensional track when an external load is applied to the leading motor, mimicking molecular motors pulling on membrane-bound cargoes in intracellular traffic. Due to the asymmetric loading, self-organized motor clusters form spontaneously. We model the motors with a two-state...