Related papers: Molecular motion in cell membranes: analytic study…
Run-and-tumble is a basic model of persistent motion and a motility strategy widespread in micro-organisms and individual cells. In many natural settings, movement occurs in the presence of confinement. While accumulation at the surface has…
We study the random walk of a particle in a compartmentalized environment, as realized in biological samples or solid state compounds. Each compartment is characterized by its length $L$ and the boundaries transmittance $T$. We identify two…
In a cellular medium, the plasmic membrane is a place of interactions between the cell and its direct external environment. A classic model describes it as a fluid mosaic. The fluid phase of the membrane allows a lateral degree of freedom…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
Cell polarity and movement are fundamental to many biological functions. Experimental and theoretically studies have indicated that interactions of certain proteins lead to the cell polarization which plays a key role in controlling the…
Processive molecular motors which drive the traffic of organelles in cells move in a directed way along cytoskeletal filaments. On large time scales, they perform motor walks, i.e., peculiar random walks which arise from the repeated…
We study the one-dimensional motion of a Brownian particle inside a confinement described by two reactive boundaries which can partially reflect or absorb the particle. Understanding the effects of such boundaries is important in physics,…
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
The more we learn about the cytoplasm of cells, the more we realise that the cytoplasm is not uniform but instead is highly inhomogeneous. In any inhomogeneous solution, there are concentration gradients, and particles move either up or…
In cell membranes, proteins and lipids diffuse in a highly crowded and heterogeneous landscape, where aggregates and dense domains of proteins or lipids obstruct the path of diffusing molecules. In general, hindered motion gives rise to…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
We consider random walkers that deform the medium as they move, enabling a faster motion in regions which have been recently visited. This induces an effective attraction between walkers mediated by the medium, which can be regarded as a…
Arising as a fluctuation phenomenon, the equilibrium distribution of meandering steps with mean separation $<\ell>$ on a "tilted" surface can be fruitfully analyzed using results from RMT. The set of step configurations in 2D can be mapped…
Transport phenomena play a crucial role in modern physics and applied sciences. Examples include the dissipation of energy across a large system, the distribution of quantum information in optical networks, and the timely modeling of…
Cytoplasmic dyneins transport cellular organelles by moving on a microtubule filament. It has been found recently that depending on the applied force and the concentration of the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecules, dynein's step size…
We investigate the lateral dynamics in a purely viscous lipid membrane surrounded by viscoelastic media such as polymeric solutions. We first obtain the generalized frequency-dependent mobility tensor and focus on the case when the solvent…
We theoretically study the transport properties of self-propelled particles on complex structures, such as motor proteins on filament networks. A general master equation formalism is developed to investigate the persistent motion of…
Random walks with a general, nonlinear barrier have found recent applications ranging from reionization topology to refinements in the excursion set theory of halos. Here, we derive the first-crossing distribution of random walks with a…
When addressing spatial biological questions using mathematical models, symmetries within the system are often exploited to simplify the problem by reducing its physical dimension. In a reduced-dimension model molecular movement is…
We investigate the dynamics of a tagged particle embedded in a strongly interacting confined liquid enclosed between two opposing flat walls. Using the Zwanzig-Mori projection operator formalism we obtain an equation of motion for the…