Related papers: Fluctuation analysis of mechanochemical coupling d…
Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Collectives of actively-moving particles can spontaneously separate into dilute and dense phases -- a fascinating phenomenon known as motility-induced phase separation (MIPS). MIPS is well-studied for randomly-moving particles with no…
Three problems in the statistical mechanics of models for an assembly of molecular motors interacting with cytoskeletal filaments are reviewed. First, a description of the hydrodynamical behaviour of density-density correlations in…
Observations of single epidermal cells on flat adhesive substrates have revealed two distinct morphological and functional states, namely a non-migrating symmetric unpolarized state and a migrating asymmetric polarized state. These states…
The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously restructuring itself. Enzymatic motors that act on the…
Intracellular transport is an essential function in eucaryotic cells, facilitated by motor proteins - proteins converting chemical energy into kinetic energy. It is known that motor proteins work in teams enabling unidirectional and…
We investigate the dependence of the displacements of a molecular motor embedded inside a glassy material on its folding characteristic time. We observe two different time regimes. For slow foldings (regime I) the diffusion evolves very…
Fueled by the hydrolysis of ATP, the motor protein kinesin literally walks on two legs along the biopolymer microtubule. The number of accidental backsteps that kinesin takes appears to be much larger than what one would expect given the…
We present a quantitative analysis of recent data on the kinetics of ATP hydrolysis, which has presented a puzzle regarding the load dependence of the Michaelis constant. Within the framework of coarse grained two-state ratchet models, our…
Cells and tissues exert forces and can actively change shape. This strikingly autonomous behavior is powered by the cytoskeleton, which includes an active gel of actin filaments, crosslinks, and myosin molecular motors. Although individual…
This article reviews the mechanical bidomain model, a mathematical description how the extracellular matrix and intracellular cytoskeleton are coupled by integrin proteins. The fundamental hypothesis is that differences between…
Molecular motors are single macromolecules that generate forces at the piconewton range and nanometer scale. They convert chemical energy into mechanical work by moving along filamentous structures. In this paper, we study the velocity of…
We consider two types of fluctuations in the mass-action equilibrium in protein binding networks. The first type is driven by relatively slow changes in total concentrations (copy numbers) of interacting proteins. The second type, to which…
In the presence of ATP, molecular motors generate active force dipoles that drive suspensions of protein filaments far from thermodynamic equilibrium, leading to exotic dynamics and pattern formation. Microscopic modelling can help to…
In cells, organelles and vesicles are usually transported by cooperation of several motor proteins, including plus-end directed motor kinesin and minus-end directed motor dynein. Many biophysical models have been constructed to understand…
Mechanics has an important role during morphogenesis, both in the generation of forces driving cell shape changes and in determining the effective material properties of cells and tissues. Drosophila dorsal closure (DC) has emerged as a…
The nonequilibrium response and fluctuations of Markovian systems, both near and far from equilibrium, are best understood by varying their parameters along dynamical equivalence classes. In this note, I illustrate this approach for an…
We study the model of a molecular switch comprised of a molecule with a soft vibrational degree of freedom coupled to metallic leads. In the presence of strong electron-ion interaction, different charge states of the molecule correspond to…
Intracellular transport of vesicular cargos, organelles, and other macromolecules is an essential process to move large items through a crowded, and inhomogeneous cellular environment. In an effort to dissect the fundamental effects of…