Related papers: Fluctuation analysis of mechanochemical coupling d…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
A molecular motor is made of either a single macromolecule or a macromolecular complex. Just like their macroscopic counterparts, molecular motors "transduce" input energy into mechanical work. All the nano-motors considered here operate…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an…
Recent experiments reveal both passive subdiffusion of various nanoparticles and anomalous active transport of such particles by molecular motors in the molecularly crowded environment of living biological cells. Passive and active…
Autonomous oscillations in biological systems may have a biochemical origin or result from an interplay between force-generating and visco-elastic elements. In molecular motor assemblies the force-generating elements are molecular engines…
Actin filaments, crosslinkers and myosin molecular motors form contractile networks. For instance, the cell cortex is a thin network below the cell membrane ; contraction of the cell cortex allows cells to round up during cell division.…
The bacterial flagellar motor drives the rotation of flagellar filaments and enables many species of bacteria to swim. Torque is generated by interaction of stator units, anchored to the peptidoglycan cell wall, with the rotor. Recent…
The motion of molecular motor is essential to the biophysical functioning of living cells. In principle, this motion can be regraded as a multiple chemical states process. In which, the molecular motor can jump between different chemical…
We analyze experimental observations of microtubules undergoing small fluctuations about a "balance point" when mixed in solution of two different kinesin motor proteins, KLP61F and Ncd. It has been proposed that the microtubule movement is…
Motivated by experimental results on the interplay between molecular motors and tau proteins, we extend lattice-based models of intracellular transport to include a second species of particle which locally influences the motor-filament…
Pattern formation and the mechanics of a mixture of actin filaments and myosin motors that is confined by a rigid membrane is investigated. By using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics model, we demonstrate that the competition between the…
The traffic of molecular motors which interact through mutual exclusion is studied theoretically for half-open tube-like compartments. These half-open tubes mimic the shapes of axons. The mutual exclusion leads to traffic jams or density…
During the morphogenesis of tissues and tumors, cells often interact with neighbors with different mechanical properties, but the understanding of its role is lacking. We use active Brownian Dynamics simulations to study a model co-culture…
Intracellular transport is based on molecular motors that pull cargos along cytoskeletal filaments. One motor species always moves in one direction, e.g. conventional kinesin moves to the microtubule plus end, while cytoplasmic dynein moves…
We examine the stochastic dynamics of two enzymes that are mechanically coupled to each other, e.g., through an elastic substrate or a fluid medium. The enzymes undergo conformational changes during their catalytic cycle, which itself is…
Actin and myosin drive many instances of force generation, deformation, and shape change in cells, tissues, and organisms. In particular, cytoskeletal actomyosin is remarkable in its adaptive architecture, responding to a host of…
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.…
Molecular motors are macromolecular complexes which use some form of input energy to perform mechanical work. The filamentary tracks, on which these motors move, are made of either proteins (e.g., microtubules) or nucleic acids (DNA or…
We address the controversial hot question concerning the validity of the loose coupling versus the lever-arm theories in the actomyosin dynamics by re-interpreting and extending the phenomenological washboard potential model proposed by…