English

Peristalsis by pulses of activity

Biological Physics 2021-04-21 v1

Abstract

Peristalsis by actively generated waves of muscle contraction is one of the most fundamental ways of producing motion in living systems. We show that peristalsis can be modeled by a train of rectangular-shaped solitary waves of localized activity propagating through otherwise passive matter. Our analysis is based on the FPU-type discrete model accounting for active stresses and we reveal the existence in this problem of a critical regime which we argue to be physiologically advantageous.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.07017,
  title  = {Peristalsis by pulses of activity},
  author = {Nikolai Gorbushin and Lev Truskinovsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.07017},
  year   = {2021}
}