Damien Cuvelier

• associate professor
• Professor (Assistant) at Sorbonne University

Induced spontaneous curvature is a new mechanism of microcapsules bursting by nucleation and growth of a hole surrounded by a curling rim. Here we study the dynamics of curling on a macroscopic scale induced by the elastic curvature of a bilayer of tracing paper and tape after soaking by water. The ribbon which is fully stretched at time t = 0 is i...

We describe a simple and robust method for high-throughput surface patterning of deformable substrates such as silicone rubber films covered with a thin layer of protein and cell antifouling hydrogel (PLL-g-PEG). The irradiation with deep UV (<200 nm) of PLL-g-PEG-coated rubber substrates through a synthetic quartz photomask created micropatterns o...

Micropatterned poly(dimethylsiloxane) substrates fabricated by soft lithography led to large-scale orientation of myoblasts in culture, thereby controlling the orientation of the myotubes they formed. Fusion occurred on many chemically identical surfaces in which varying structures were arranged in square or hexagonal lattices, but only a subset of...

The actin cortex is an essential element of the cytoskeleton allowing cells to control and modify their shape. It is involved in cell division and migration. However, probing precisely the physical properties of the actin cortex has proved to be challenging: it is a thin and dynamic material, and its location in the cell—directly under the plasma m...

Microtubules are cytoskeleton components with unique mechanical and dynamic properties. They are rigid polymers that alternate phases of growth and shrinkage. Nonetheless, the cells can display a subset of stable microtubules, but it is unclear whether microtubule dynamics and mechanical properties are related. Recent in vitro studies suggest that...

The immune synapse is the tight contact zone between a lymphocyte and a cell presenting its cognate antigen. This structure serves as a signaling platform and entails a polarization of intracellular components necessary to the immunological function of the cell. While the surface properties of the presenting cell are known to control the formation...

One of the many effects of soft tissues under mechanical solicitation in the cellular damage produced by high localized strain. Here, we study the response of peripheral Stress Fibers (SFs) to external stretch in mammalian cells, plated onto deformable micro-patterned substrates. A local fluorescence analysis reveals that an adaptation response is...

Mechanics has been a central focus of physical biology in the past decade. In comparison, how cells manage their size is less understood. Here we show that a parameter central to both the physics and the physiology of the cell, its volume, depends on a mechano-osmotic coupling. We found that cells change their volume depending on the rate at which...

The fate of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) is regulated by their interaction with stromal cells in the bone marrow. However, the cellular mechanisms regulating HSPC interaction with these cells and their potential impact on HSPC polarity are still poorly understood. Here we evaluated the impact of cell–cell contacts with osteoblast...

Mechanics has been a central focus of physical biology in the past decade. In comparison, the osmotic and electric properties of cells are less understood. Here we show that a parameter central to both the physics and the physiology of the cell, its volume, depends on a mechano-osmotic coupling. We found that cells change their volume depending on...

Although textbook pictures depict the cell nucleus as a simple ovoid object, it is now clear that it adopts a large variety of shapes in tissues. When cells deform, because of cell crowding or migration through dense matrices, the nucleus is subjected to large constraints that alter its shape. In this review, we discuss recent studies related to nu...

The nucleus makes the rules Single cells continuously experience and react to mechanical challenges in three-dimensional tissues. Spatial constraints in dense tissues, physical activity, and injury all impose changes in cell shape. How cells can measure shape deformations to ensure correct tissue development and homeostasis remains largely unknown...

The microscopic environment inside a metazoan organism is highly crowded. Whether individual cells can tailor their behavior to the limited space remains unclear. Here, we found that cells measure the degree of spatial confinement using their largest and stiffest organelle, the nucleus. Cell confinement below a resting nucleus size deforms the nucl...

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...

Significance Cellular aggregates are in vitro model of tumors. Deposited on adhesive substrates, they spread like liquid droplets with a monolayer expanding from the aggregate. We model spreading dynamics by balancing driving forces at the film periphery and viscous forces associated to the penetration of the cells from the (3D) aggregate into the...

The dynamics of cellular adhesion and deadhesion, which play key roles in many cellular processes, have most often been studied at the scale of single bonds or single cells. However, multicellular adhesion and deadhesion are also central processes in tissue mechanics, morphogenesis, and pathophysiology, where collective tissue phenomena may introdu...

Maintaining cell cohesiveness within tissues requires that intercellular adhesions develop sufficient strength to support traction forces applied by myosin motors and by neighboring cells. Cadherins are transmembrane receptors that mediate intercellular adhesion. The cadherin cytoplasmic domain recruits several partners, including catenins and vinc...

Pathogenic bacteria can cross from blood vessels to host tissues by opening transendothelial cell macroapertures (TEMs). To induce TEM opening, bacteria intoxicate endothelial cells with proteins that disrupt the contractile cytoskeletal network. Cell membrane tension is no longer resisted by contractile fibers, leading to the opening of TEMs. Here...

The response of cells to forces is essential for tissue morphogenesis and homeostasis. This response has been extensively investigated in interphase cells, but it remains unclear how forces affect dividing cells. We used a combination of micro-manipulation tools on human dividing cells to address the role of physical parameters of the micro-environ...

We study the spreading of spheroidal aggregates of cells, expressing a tunable level of E-cadherin molecules, on glass substrates decorated with mixed fibronectin and polyethylene glycol. We observe the contact area by optical interferometry and the profile by side-view microscopy. We find a universal law of aggregate spreading at short times, whic...

Reconstituted systems mimicking cells are interesting tools for understanding the details of cell behavior. Here, we use an experimental system that mimics cellular actin cortices, namely liposomes developing an actin shell close to their inner membrane, and we study their dynamics of spreading. We show that depending on the morphology of the actin...

We study the spontaneous curving observed when a strip of tracing paper is deposited on a water surface. The differential swelling across the ribbon thickness leads to a curling of the sheet, with the curvature increasing to a maximum and then relaxing as the sheet becomes completely wet. We develop a theoretical model, in good agreement with our e...

Reconstituted systems mimicking cells are interesting tools for understanding the details of cell behavior. Here, we use an experimental system that mimics cellular actin cortices, namely liposomes developing an actin shell close to their inner membrane, and we study their dynamics of spreading. We show that depending on the morphology of the actin...

Upon light exposure, photosensitizers generate reactive chemical species that lead to cellular membrane alteration. On the one hand, this property is exploited in photodynamic therapy to irreversibly destroy diseased tissues. On the other hand, the reactivity of photosensitizers with lipidmembranes prevents encapsulation or loading in liposomes for...

Upon light exposure, photosensitizers generate reactive chemical species that lead to cellular membrane alteration. On the one hand, this property is exploited in photodynamic therapy to irreversibly destroy diseased tissues. On the other hand, the reactivity of photosensitizers with lipid membranes prevents encapsulation or loading in liposomes fo...

Polymersomes, which are stable and robust vesicles made of block copolymer amphiphiles, are good candidates for drug carriers or micro/nanoreactors. Polymer chemistry enables almost unlimited molecular design of responsive polymersomes whose degradation upon environmental changes has been used for the slow release of active species. Here, we propos...

Polymersomes, which are stable and robust vesicles made of block copolymer amphiphiles, are good candidates for drug carriers or micro/nanoreactors. Polymer chemistry enables almost unlimited molecular design of responsive polymersomes whose degradation upon environmental changes has been used for the slow release of active species. Here, we propos...

Polymersomes are vesicles made of amphiphilic diblock copolymers. Giant polymersomes of several tens of microns in diameter can be prepared from low Tg (glass transition temperature) flexible (coil-coil) copolymers by processes such as rehydration swelling or electroformation. These techniques are, however, inefficient in producing giant polymersom...

Membrane nanotubes or tethers extruded from cells exhibit dynamic features that are believed to exhibit viscoelastic rheological properties. We have performed typical microrheology experiments on tethers pulled from red blood cells by measuring the force response to small oscillatory extensions or compressions. Our data, supported by a simple theor...

Cells actively produce contractile forces for a variety of processes including cytokinesis and motility. Contractility is known to rely on myosin II motors which convert chemical energy from ATP hydrolysis into forces on actin filaments. However, the basic physical principles of cell contractility remain poorly understood. We reconstitute contracti...

Considerable effort over the past three decades has allowed the identification of the protein families that control the cellular machinery responsible for intracellular transport within eukaryotic cells. These proteins are estimated to represent about 10-20% of the human "proteome." The complexity of intracellular transport makes useful the develop...

EPL, 84 (2008) 18004 Please visit the new website www.epljournal.org

Polymersomes are vesicles made of amphiphilic diblock copolymers. Giant polymersomes of several tens of microns in diameter can be prepared from low T g (glass transition temperature) flexible (coil-coil) copolymers by processes such as rehydration swelling or electroformation. These techniques are, however, inefficient in producing giant polymerso...

Cell adhesion and motility depend strongly on the interactions between cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) substrates. When plated onto artificial adhesive surfaces, cells first flatten and deform extensively as they spread. At the molecular level, the interaction of membrane-based integrins with the ECM has been shown to initiate a complex cascad...

We discuss the pulling force f required to extrude a lipid tube from a living cell as a function of the extrusion velocity L. The main feature is membrane friction on the cytoskeleton. As recently observed for neutrophils, the tether force exhibits a "shear thinning" response over a large range of pulling velocities, which was previously interprete...

We discuss the pulling force f required to extrude a lipid tube from a living cell as a function of the extrusion velocity L ˙ . The main feature is membrane friction on the cytoskeleton. As recently observed for neutrophils, the tether force exhibits a ''shear thin-ning'' response over a large range of pulling velocities, which was previously inte...

We used optical tweezers to measure the force-extension curve for the elongation of nanotubes from adhered giant vesicles. We show that the force increases significantly with the length of the tube, which is drastically different from what is observed when the membrane tension is kept constant, e.g. by pipette aspiration. The absence of any force p...

In the "adhesion" section, we have shown that the dynamics of vesicle adhesion induced by specific stickers was either governed by the diffusion of ligands in the membrane or by the reaction time between immobilized receptors and ligands, depending on the chemical preparation of the decorated substrate. In contrast, the early stages of living cell...

Tethers are nanocylinders of lipid bilayer membrane, arising in situations ranging from micromanipulation experiments on synthetic vesicles to the formation of dynamic tubular networks in the Golgi apparatus. Relying on the extensive theoretical and experimental works aimed to understand the physics of individual tethers formation, we addressed the...

We have recently developed a minimal system for generating long tubular nanostructures that resemble tubes observed in vivo with biological membranes. Here, we studied membrane tube pulling in ternary mixtures of sphingomyelin, phosphatidylcholine and cholesterol. Two salient results emerged: the lipid composition is significantly different in the...

We used optical tweezers to measure the force-extension curve for the elongation of nanotubes from adhered giant vesicles. We show that the force increases significantly with the length of the tube, which is drastically different from what is observed when the membrane tension is kept constant, e.g. by pipette aspiration. The absence of any force p...

We have recently developed a minimal system for generat-ing long tubular nanostructures that resemble tubes ob-served in vivo with biological membranes. Here, we studied membrane tube pulling in ternary mixtures of sphingo-myelin, phosphatidylcholine and cholesterol. Two salient results emerged: the lipid composition is significantly different in t...

We experimentally studied the adhesion dynamics of vesicles decorated with specific stickers onto bioactive surfaces. The growth laws were found to strongly depend upon the chemical preparation of the substrate and were rationalized with theoretical descriptions based on scaling law arguments. By using a micropipette-free approach, we demonstrate t...

The interest in physical approaches to the study of cell adhesion has generated numerous recent works on the development of substrates mimicking the extracellular matrix and the use of giant synthetic liposomes, commonly considered as basic models of living cells. The use of well-characterized bioactive substrates and artificial cells should allow...

The interest in physical approaches to the study of cell adhesion has generated numerous recent works on the development of substrates mimicking the extracellular matrix and the use of giant synthetic liposomes, commonly considered as basic models of living cells. The use of well-characterized bioactive substrates and artificial cells should allow...

We report in this paper two simple and effective methods to decorate glass surfaces that enable protein micropatterning and subsequent spatially controlled adhesion of cells. The first method combines simultaneously the potentialities of two existing techniques, namely microcontact printing (muCP) and microfluidic networks (muFN) to achieve dual pr...

The formation of membrane tubes (or tethers), which is a crucial event in many biological processes, is intrinsically a dynamic process. In this paper, we discuss both theoretically and experimentally the dynamical laws that govern extrusion and retraction of tubes extracted from lipid vesicles at high speed and under strong flows. A detailed descr...

The formation of membrane tubes (or tethers), which is a crucial event in many biological processes, is intrinsically a dynamic process. In this paper, we discuss both theoretically and experimentally the dynamical laws that govern extrusion and retraction of tubes extracted from lipid vesicles at high speed and under strong flows. A detailed descr...

We report in this paper two simple and effe-ctive methods to decorate glass surfaces that enable protein micropatterning and subsequent spatially controlled adhesion of cells. The first method combines simultaneously the potentialities of two existing tech-niques, namely microcontact printing (lCP) and microfluidic networks (lFN) to achieve dual pr...