Related papers: Microtubule dynamics depart from wormlike chain mo…
We use single-particle tracking to study the elastic properties of single microtubules grafted to a substrate. Thermal fluctuations of the free microtubule's end are recorded, in order to measure position distribution functions from which…
Starting from the hypothesis that the tubulin dimer is a conformationally bistable molecule - fluctuating between a curved and a straight configuration at room temperature - we develop a model for polymorphic dynamics of the microtubule…
Microtubules have been in biophysical focus for several decades. Yet the confusing and mutually contradicting results regarding their elasticity and fluctuations have shed some doubts on their present understanding. In this paper we expose…
We use optical trapping to continuously bend an isolated microtubule while simultaneously measuring the applied force and the resulting filament strain, thus allowing us to determine its elastic properties over a wide range of applied…
We study the shape, elasticity and fluctuations of the recently predicted (cond-mat/9510172) and subsequently observed (in numerical simulations) (cond-mat/9705059) tubule phase of anisotropic membranes, as well as the phase transitions…
Magnetic flux dynamics in type-II superconductors is studied within the model of a viscous nonlinear diffusion of vortices for various sample geometries. We find that time dependence of magnetic moment relaxation after the field is switched…
The transfer of mechanical signals through cells is a complex phenomenon. To uncover a new mechanotransduction pathway, we study the frequency-dependent transport of mechanical stimuli by single microtubules and small networks in a…
We investigate the effect of thermal fluctuations on the mechanical properties of nanotubes by employing tools from statistical physics. For 2D sheets it was previously shown that thermal fluctuations effectively renormalize elastic moduli…
A simple stochastic model which describes microtubule dynamics and explicitly takes into account the relevant biochemical processes is presented. The model incorporates binding and unbinding of monomers and random phosphate release inside…
In the past fifteen years, flow instabilities reminiscent of the Taylor-like instabilities driven by hoop stresses, have been observed in wormlike micelles based on surfactant molecules. In particular, purely elastic instabilities and…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
A mean-field kinetic model suggests that the relaxation dynamics of wormlike micellar networks is a long and complex process due to the problem of reducing the number of free end-caps (or dangling ends) while also reaching an equilibrium…
We investigate the dynamics of an idealized model of microtubule growth that evolves by: (i) attachment of guanosine triphosphate (GTP) at rate lambda, (ii) conversion of GTP to guanosine diphosphate (GDP) at rate 1, and (iii) detachment of…
A novel theoretical model of dynamic instability of a system of linear (1D) microtubules (MTs) in a bounded domain is introduced for studying the role of a cell edge in vivo and analyzing the effect of competition for a limited amount of…
Thermal fluctuations strongly modify the large length-scale elastic behavior of crosslinked membranes, giving rise to scale-dependent elastic moduli. While thermal effects in flat membranes are well understood, many natural and artificial…
Bundles of filamentous polymers are primary structural components of a broad range of cytoskeletal structures, and their mechanical properties play key roles in cellular functions ranging from locomotion to mechanotransduction and…
Here, we trap and control the position of droplets to study their dynamics using hydrodynamic forces alone without an external field. The hydrodynamic trap is adapted from a previously implemented Stokes trap by incorporating a…
We investigate an analytically tractable toy model for thermally induced polymorphic dynamics of cooperatively rearranging biofilaments - like microtubules. The proposed 4 -block model, which can be seen as a coarse-grained approximation of…
In this work we present the general phase behavior of short tubelike flexible polymers. The geometric thickness constraint is implemented through the concept of the global radius of curvature. We use sophisticated Monte Carlo sampling…
Microtubule dynamics is largely influenced by nucleotide hydrolysis and the resultant tubulin configuration changes. The GTP cap model has been proposed to interpret the stabilizing mechanism of microtubule growth from the view of…