Related papers: Length control of microtubules by depolymerizing m…
Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) are very selective filters that monitor the transport between the cytoplasm and the nucleoplasm. Two models have been suggested for the plug of the NPC. They are (i) it is a reversible hydrogel or (ii) it is a…
Protein folding is the intricate process by which a linear sequence of amino acids self-assembles into a unique three-dimensional structure. Protein folding kinetics is the study of pathways and time-dependent mechanisms a protein undergoes…
Molecular diffusion measurements are widely used to probe microstructure in materials and living organisms noninvasively. The precise relation of diffusion metrics to microstructure remains a major challenge: In complex samples, it is often…
Microtubules are an essential physical building block of cellular systems. They are organized using specific crosslinkers, motors, and influencers of nucleation and growth. With the addition of anti-parallel crosslinkers, microtubule…
In cell membranes, proteins and lipids diffuse in a highly crowded and heterogeneous landscape, where aggregates and dense domains of proteins or lipids obstruct the path of diffusing molecules. In general, hindered motion gives rise to…
Blood leukocytes can exhibit extensive morphological changes during their passage through small capillary vessels. The human monocytic THP-1 cell line was used to explore the metabolic dependence of these shape changes. Cells were aspirated…
Cytoskeletal networks are foundational examples of active matter and central to self-organized structures in the cell. In vivo, these networks are active and heavily crosslinked. Relating their large-scale dynamics to properties of their…
The scission kinetics of bottle-brush molecules in solution and on an adhesive substrate is modeled by means of Molecular Dynamics simulation with Langevin thermostat. Our macromolecules comprise a long flexible polymer backbone with $L$…
Intracellular transport of large cargoes, such as organelles, vesicles or large proteins, is a complex dynamical process that involves the interplay of ATP-consuming molecular motors, cytoskeleton filaments and the viscoelastic cytoplasm.…
A variety of complex mechanisms, from chemical reaction pathways to active fluctuations, orchestrate molecular transport in intracellular environments. Despite significant recent progress in visualizing and probing these processes, little…
Cells accomplish diverse functions using the same molecular building blocks, from setting up cytoplasmic flows to generating mechanical forces. In particular, transitions between these non-equilibrium states are triggered by regulating the…
Proteins are polymers of amino acids. These macromolecules are synthesized by intracellular machines called ribosomes. Although the experimental investigation of protein synthesis has been a traditional area of research in molecular cell…
We study a Markov random process describing a muscle molecular motor behavior. Every motor is either bound up with a thin filament or unbound. In the bound state the motor creates a force proportional to its displacement from the neutral…
A model for the unidirectional movement of dynein is presented based on structural observations and biochemical experimental results available. In this model, the binding affinity of dynein for microtubule is independent of its nucleotide…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
The coarsening instability typically disrupts steady-state cluster-size distributions. We show that degradation coupled to the cluster size, such as arising from biological proteolysis, leads to a novel fixed-point cluster size. Stochastic…
Several neurological disorders are associated with the aggregation of aberrant proteins, often localized in intracellular organelles such as the endoplasmic reticulum. Here we study protein aggregation kinetics by mean-field reactions and…
In this letter, we show that pore-scale diffusiophoresis of colloidal particles along local salt gradients manifests in the macroscopic dispersion of particles in a porous medium. Despite is transient character, this microscopic phenomenon…
Significance: The depolarization of circularly polarized light caused by scattering in turbid media reveals structural information about the dispersed particles, such as their size, density, and distribution, which is useful for…
In soft porous media, deformation drives solute transport via the intrinsic coupling between flow of the fluid and rearrangement of the pore structure. Solute transport driven by periodic loading, in particular, can be of great relevance in…