Bistability of Dielectrically Anisotropic Nematic Crystals and the Adaptation of Endothelial Collectives to Stress Fields.

ABSTRACT: Endothelial monolayers physiologically adapt to flow and flow-induced wall shear stress, attaining ordered configurations in which elongation, orientation, and polarization are coherently organized over many cells. Here, with the flow direction unchanged, a peculiar bi-stable (along the flow direction or perpendicular to it) cell alignment is observed, emerging as a function of the flow intensity alone, while cell polarization is purely instructed by flow directionality. Driven by the experimental findings, the parallelism between endothelia is delineated under a flow field and the transition of dual-frequency nematic liquid crystals under an external oscillatory electric field. The resulting physical model reproduces the two stable configurations and the energy landscape of the correspond

SUBMITTER: Stefopoulos G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9165505 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature