Related papers: Molecular motion in cell membranes: analytic study…
Propagation and interference of quantum-mechanical particles comprise an important part of elementary processes in quantum physics, and their essence can be modeled using a quantum walk, a mathematical concept that describes the motion of a…
Motivated by subdiffusive motion of bio-molecules observed in living cells we study the stochastic properties of a non-Brownian particle whose motion is governed by either fractional Brownian motion or the fractional Langevin equation and…
The ability of eukaryotic cells to squeeze through constrictions is limited by the stiffness of their large and rigid nucleus. However, migrating cells are often able to overcome this limitation and pass through constrictions much smaller…
This paper proposes an effective phase diffusion method to analyze chemical exchange in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The chemical exchange involves spin jumps around different sites where the spin angular frequencies vary, which leads…
The transport of individual entities through interconnected structures is a process of practical relevance both in biology and technology. Examples are given by diffusive dynamics of molecules in porous structures. In soft environments,…
Optical tweezers setup is often used to probe the motion of individual tracer particle, which promotes the study of relaxation dynamics of a generic process confined in a harmonic potential. We uncover the dependence of ensemble- and…
The migratory dynamics of cells can be influenced by the complex micro-environment through which they move. It remains unclear how the motility machinery of confined cells responds and adapts to their micro-environment. Here, we propose a…
We investigate the dynamics of a particle moving randomly along a disordered hetero-polymer subjected to rapid conformational changes which induce superdiffusive motion in chemical coordinates. We study the antagonistic interplay between…
Motivated by a range of biological applications related to the transport of molecules in cells, we present a modular framework to treat first-passage problems for diffusion in partitioned spaces. The spatial domains can differ with respect…
The movement of molecules inside living cells is a fundamental feature of biological processes. The ability to both observe and analyse the details of molecular diffusion in vivo at the single molecule and single cell level can add…
We study quantum transport on finite discrete structures and we model the process by means of continuous-time quantum walks. A direct and effective comparison between quantum and classical walks can be attained based on the average…
We study the flow of membranal fluid through a ring of immobile particles mimicking, for example, a fence around a membrane corral. We obtain a simple closed-form expression for the permeability coefficient of the ring as a function of the…
An analytic effective medium theory is constructed to study the mean access times for random walks on hybrid disordered structures formed by embedding complex networks into regular lattices, considering transition rates $F$ that are…
Living cells are characterized by the micrometric confinement of various macromolecules at high concentrations. Using droplets containing binary polymer blends as artificial cells, we previously showed that cell-sized confinement causes…
We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…
The diffusion of small molecular penetrants through polymeric materials represents an important fundamental problem, relevant to the design of materials for applications such as coatings and membranes. Polymer networks hold promise in these…
A random walk scheme, consisting of alternating phases of regular Brownian motion and L\'evy walks, is proposed as a model for run-and-tumble bacterial motion. Within the continuous-time random walk approach we obtain the long-time and…
We consider a random walk model in a one-dimensional environment, formed by several zones of finite width with the fixed transition probabilities. It is also assumed that the transitions to the left and right neighboring points have unequal…
The problem of a restricted random walk on graphs which keeps track of the number of immediate reversal steps is considered by using a transfer matrix formulation. A closed-form expression is obtained for the generating function of the…
Transport of molecules across membrane channels is investigated theoretically using exactly solvable discrete stochastic site-binding models. It is shown that the interaction potential between molecules and the channel has a strong effect…