Related papers: Molecular Spiders with Memory
In this letter, we adopt a new approach combining theoretical modeling with silk stretching measurements to explore the mystery of the structures between silkworm and spider silks, leading to the differences in mechanical response against…
A theory is presented for the binding of small molecules such as surfactants to semiflexible polymers. The persistence length is assumed to be large compared to the monomer size but much smaller than the total chain length. Such polymers…
Bacteria typically reside in heterogeneous environments with various chemogradients where motile cells can gain an advantage over non-motile cells. Since motility is energetically costly, cells must optimize their swimming speed and…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…
Whirling and swerving, a bacterium is swimming in a test tube, foraging for food. On the surface of a vibrating bath, a droplet starts walking. A certain similarity, but mostly dissimilarity, between the physical memory that emerges in…
We deduce a microstructure inspired model for humidity and temperature effects on the mechanical response of spider silks, modelled as a composite material with a hard crystalline and a soft amorphous region. Water molecules decrease the…
Molecular motors interacting with cytoskeletal filaments undergo peculiar random walks consisting of alternating sequences of directed movements along the filaments and diffusive motion in the surrounding solution. An ensemble of motors is…
Most legged robots are built with leg structures from serially mounted links and actuators and are controlled through complex controllers and sensor feedback. In comparison, animals developed multi-segment legs, mechanical coupling between…
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…
We study a lattice gas of persistent walkers, in which each site is occupied by at most one particle and the direction each particle attempts to move to depends on its last step. We analyse the mean squared displacement (MSD) of the…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not completely understood. We consider simplified models for…
We study the trace reconstruction problem for spider graphs. Let $n$ be the number of nodes of a spider and $d$ be the length of each leg, and suppose that we are given independent traces of the spider from a deletion channel in which each…
Random walks on graphs can be slow. To speed them up, imagine that at each step instead of choosing the neighbor at random, there is a small probability $\varepsilon>0$ that we can choose it. We show that in this case, at least for graphs…
We consider a random walk in an i.i.d. random environment on Z that is perturbed by cookies of strength 1. The number of cookies per site is assumed to be i.i.d. Results on the speed of the random walk are obtained. Our main tool is the…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…
Synthetic biology aims at designing modular genetic circuits that can be assembled according to the desired function. When embedded in a cell, a circuit module becomes a small subnetwork within a larger environmental network, and its…
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…