Related papers: Molecular Spiders in One Dimension
Colloidal molecules are ideal model systems for mimicking real molecules and can serve as versatile building blocks for the bottom-up self-assembly of flexible and smart materials. While most colloidal molecules are rigid objects, the…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
Orb-weaving spiders detect prey on a web using vibration sensors at leg joints. They often dynamically crouch their legs during prey sensing, likely an active sensing strategy. However, how leg crouching enhances sensing is poorly…
Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…
Spider silk is biocompatible, biodegradable, and rivals some of the best synthetic materials in terms of strength and toughness. Despite extensive research, comprehensive experimental evidence of the formation and morphology of its internal…
Orb-weaving spiders primarily sense leg vibrations to detect and locate prey caught on their wheel-shaped webs. Biological experiments and computational modeling elucidated the physics of how these spiders use long-timescale web-building…
Spider silks are remarkable materials characterized by superb mechanical properties such as strength, extensibility and lightweightedness. Yet, to date, limited models are available to fully explore sequence-property relationships for…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Stochastic models of reaction-diffusion systems are important for the study of biochemical reaction networks where species are present in low copy numbers or if reactions are highly diffusion limited. In living cells many such systems…
Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random…
Small droplets on slender conical fibers spontaneously move along the fiber due to capillary action. The droplet motion depends on the geometry of the cone, the surface wettability, the surface tension, the viscosity, and the droplet size.…
Several experiments on tagged molecules or particles in living systems suggest that they move anomalously slow - their mean squared displacement (MSD) increase slower than linearly with time. Leading models aimed at understanding these…
Self-repelling two-leg (biped) spider walk is considered where the local stochastic movements are governed by two independent control parameters $ \beta_d$ and $ \beta_h $, so that the former controls the distance ($ d $) between the legs…
A long-lived civilization will inevitably have to migrate towards a nearby star as its home star runs out of nuclear fuel. One way to achieve such a migration is by transforming its star into a stellar engine, and to control its motion in…
Spheroids are aggregates of cells that can mimic the cellular organization often found in tissues. They are typically formed through the self-assembly of cells in a culture where there is a promotion of interactions and cell-to-cell…
Large molecules have complex potential-energy surfaces with many local minima. They exhibit multiple stereo-isomers, even at very low temperatures. In this paper we discuss the different approaches for the manipulation of the motion of…
Motility is an essential factor for an organism's survival and diversification. With the advent of novel single-cell technologies, analytical frameworks and theoretical methods, we can begin to probe the complex lives of microscopic motile…
A large variety of microorganisms produce molecules to communicate via complex signaling mechanisms such as quorum sensing and chemotaxis. The biological diversity is enormous, but synthetic inanimate colloidal microswimmers mimic…
Proteins are a matter of dual nature. As a physical object, a protein molecule is a folded chain of amino acids with multifarious biochemistry. But it is also an instantiation along an evolutionary trajectory determined by the function…
The dynamics of molecular motors which occasionally detach from a heterogeneous track like DNA or RNA is considered. Motivated by recent single molecule experiments, we study a simple model for a motor moving along a disordered track using…