Related papers: Fluctuation analysis of mechanochemical coupling d…
Motor enzymes catalyze chemical reactions, like the hydrolysis of ATP, and in the process they also perform work. Recent studies indicate that motor enzymes perform work with specific intermediate steps in their catalyzed reactions,…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
Cytoskeletal motor proteins are involved in major intracellular transport processes which are vital for maintaining appropriate cellular function. The motor exhibits distinct states of motility: active motion along filaments, and…
The mechanical properties within living cells play a critical role in the adaptive regulation of their biological functions upon environmental and internal stimuli. While these properties exhibit nonequilibrium dynamics due to the thermal…
A class of nucleosome remodeling motors translocate nucleosomes, to which they are attached, toward the middle of DNA chain in the presence of ATP during in vitro experiments. Such a biological activity is likely based on a physical…
Myxococcus xanthus is a model organism for studying bacterial social behaviors due to its ability to form complex multi-cellular structures. Knowledge of M. xanthus surface gliding motility and the mechanisms that coordinate it are…
Biomolecular motors use free energy to drive a variety of cellular tasks, including the transport of cargo, such as vesicles and organelles. We find that the widely-used `constant-force' approximation for the effect of cargo on motor…
We have used numerical simulations to investigate how the properties of motor proteins control the dynamical behavior of a driven flexible filament. The filament is pinned at one end and positioned on top of a patch of anchored motor…
Eukaryotic cells possess motility mechanisms allowing them not only to self-propel but also to exert forces on obstacles (to push) and to carry cargoes (to pull). To study the inherent asymmetry between active pushing and pulling we model a…
The study of motor protein dynamics within cytoskeletal networks is of high interest to physicists and biologists to understand how the dynamics and properties of individual motors lead to cooperative effects and control of overall network…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…
Mammalian cell polarization and motility are important processes involved in many physiological and pathological phenomena, such as embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. The traditional view of mammalian cell motility…
Previous models of the cerebrovascular smooth muscle cell have not addressed the interaction between the electrical, chemical and mechanical components of cell function during the development of active tension. These models are primarily…
We consider an explicit model of a semiflexible filament moving in two dimensions on a gliding assay of motor proteins, which attach to and detach from filament segments stochastically, with a detachment rate that depends on the local load…
In this paper, we develop and analyze a minimal model for a 2D network of cross-linked actin filaments and myosin motors, representing the cortical cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. We implement coarse-grained representations of force…
Active diffusion of intracellular components is emerging as an important process in cell biology. This process is mediated by complex assemblies of molecular motors and cytoskeletal filaments that drive force generation in the cytoplasm and…
In a single molecule assay, the motion of a molecular motor is often inferred from measuring the stochastic trajectory of a large probe particle attached to it. We discuss a simple model for this generic set-up taking into account…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
By considering subexponential contributions in large deviation theory, we determine the fine structure in the probability distribution of the observable displacement of a bead coupled to a molecular motor. More generally, for any stochastic…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…