Related papers: Effective Motion of a Virus Trafficking Inside a B…
Cell migration plays essential roles in development, wound healing, diseases, and in the maintenance of a complex body. Experiments in collective cell migration generally measure quantities such as cell displacement and velocity. The…
Intracellular cargo transport can arise from passive diffusion, active motor-driven transport along cytoskeletal filament networks, and passive advection by fluid flows entrained by such motor/cargo motion. Active and advective transport…
Routinely navigating through an ever-changing and unsteady environment, and utilizing chemical energy, molecular motors transport the cell's crucial components, such as neurotransmitters and organelles. They generate force and pull cargo,…
Microtubules are a major component of the cytoskeleton distinguished by highly dynamic behavior both in vitro and in vivo. We propose a general mathematical model that accounts for the growth, catastrophe, rescue and nucleation processes in…
Modeling and simulation are transforming all fields of biology. Tools like AlphaFold have revolutionized structural biology, while molecular dynamics simulations provide invaluable insights into the behavior of macromolecules in solution or…
Cytoskeletal crowding plays a key role in the diffusion of DNA molecules through the cell, acting as a barrier to effective intracellular transport and conformational stability required for such processes as transfection, viral infection,…
The search to understand how the HIV virus spreads inside the human body and how the immune response works to control it has motivated studies related to Mathematical Immunology. Actually, researches include the idea of mathematical models…
We present a top-down approach to the study of the dynamics of icosahedral virus capsids, in which each protein is approximated by a point mass. Although this represents a rather crude coarse-graining, we argue that it highlights several…
Power-law dwell times have been observed for molecular motors in living cells, but the origins of these trapped states are not known. We introduce a minimal model of motors moving on a two-dimensional network of filaments, and simulations…
The microtubule cytoskeleton is responsible for sustained, long-range intracellular transport of mRNAs, proteins, and organelles in neurons. Neuronal microtubules must be stable enough to ensure reliable transport, but they also undergo…
Macromolecules occupy between 34 and 44% of the cell cytoplasm, about half the maximum pack- ing density of spheres in three dimension. Yet, there is no clear understanding of what is special about this value. To address this fundamental…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
The physical approach of a small particle (virus, medical drug) to the cell membrane represents the crucial first step before active internalization and is governed by thermal diffusion. Using a fully analytical theory we show that the…
Within living cells, the transport of cargo is accomplished by groups of molecular motors. Such collective transport could utilize mechanisms which emerge from inter-motor interactions in ways that are yet to be fully understood. Here we…
The use of ad-hoc engineered viruses in the fight against tumours is one of the greatest ideas in cancer therapeutics within the last three decades. Together with other strategies such as immunotherapies, nanoparticles and adjunct…
The physics of how molecules, organelles, and foreign objects move within living cells has been extensively studied in organisms ranging from bacteria to human cells. In mammalian cells, in particular, cellular vesicles move across the cell…
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…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Diffusion is a fundamental phenomenon that occurs ubiquitously in nature and remains the subject of continuous research interest. Understanding diffusion is a key to understanding leaving systems. In this Chapter, I discuss diffusion of…