Related papers: Enhanced reaction kinetics in biological cells
Many biological molecular motors and machines are driven by chemical reactions that occur in specific catalytic sites. We study whether the arrival of molecules to such an active site can be accelerated by the presence of a nearby inactive…
Collective sensing by interacting cells is observed in a variety of biological systems, and yet a quantitative understanding of how sensory information is collectively encoded is lacking. Here we investigate the ATP-induced calcium dynamics…
Living cells dynamically modulate the local morphologies of their actin cytoskeletons to perform biological functions, including force transduction, intracellular transport, and cell division. A major challenge is to understand how diverse…
Transport of ions and small molecules across the cell membrane against electrochemical gradients is catalyzed by integral membrane proteins that use a source of free energy to drive the energetically uphill flux of the transported…
Viewed under a fluorescence microscope, the actomyosin cytoskeleton presents vivid streaks of lines together with persistent oscillatory waves. Using an active hydrodynamic approach, we show how a uniform distribution of single or mixture…
The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of…
Cell migration is a fundamental process underlying the survival and function of both unicellular and multicellular organisms. Crawling motility in eukaryotic cells arises from cyclic protrusion and retraction driven by the cytoskeleton,…
Living cells display a remarkable capacity to compartmentalize their functional biochemistry. A particularly fascinating example is the cell nucleus. Exchange of macromolecules between the nucleus and the surrounding cytoplasm does not…
Inside cells, cargos such as vesicles and organelles are transported by molecular motors to their correct locations via active motion on cytoskeletal tracks and passive, Brownian diffusion. During the transportation of cargos, motor-cargo…
Here we generalize our previous model of molecular motors trafficking subdiffusing cargos in viscoelastic cytosol by (i) including mechanochemical coupling between cyclic conformational fluctuations of the motor protein driven by the…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
Motivated by recent experimental results for the step sizes of dynein motor proteins, we develope a cellular automata model for intra-cellular traffic of dynein motors incorporating special features of the hindrance-dependent step size of…
One common feature of a vehicle, an ant and a kinesin motor is that they all convert chemical energy, derived from fuel or food, into mechanical energy required for their forward movement; such objects have been modelled in recent years as…
Traffic-like collective movements are observed at almost all levels of biological systems. Molecular motor proteins like, for example, kinesin and dynein, which are the vehicles of almost all intra-cellular transport in eukayotic cells,…
Active transport of biomolecules assisted by motor proteins is imperative for the proper functioning of cellular activities. Inspired by the diffusion of active agents in crowded cellular channels, we computationally investigate the…
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…
Single-cell trajectory analysis aims to reconstruct the biological developmental processes of cells as they evolve over time, leveraging temporal correlations in gene expression. During cellular development, gene expression patterns…
In this paper, we introduce an ASEP-like transport model for bidirectional motion of particles on a multi-lane lattice. The model is motivated by {\em in vivo} experiments on organelle motility along a microtubule (MT), consisting of…
In intracellular transports, motor proteins transport macromolecules as cargos to desired locations by moving on biopolymers such as microtubules. Recent experiments suggest that cargos that can associate motor proteins during their…
Randomly moving active particles can be herded into directed motion by asymmetric geometric structures. Although such a rectification process has been extensively studied due to its fundamental, biological, and technological relevance, a…