Related papers: Molecular motion in cell membranes: analytic study…
The analysis of single particle trajectories plays an important role in elucidating dynamics within complex environments such as those found in living cells. However, the characterization of intracellular particle motion is often confounded…
In this paper we focus our attention on a particle that follows a unidirectional quantum walk, an alternative version of the nowadays widespread discrete-time quantum walk on a line. Here the walker at each time step can either remain in…
We calculate the diffusion coefficients of persistent random walks on cubic and hypercubic lattices, where the direction of a walker at a given step depends on the memory of one or two previous steps. These results are then applied to study…
Living organisms employ diverse strategies to navigate confined environments. Inspired by translocation observations on California blackworms (\textit{Lumbriculus variegatus}), we combine biological experiments and active-polymer…
Diffusion in cell membranes is not just simple two-dimensional Brownian motion, but typically depends on the timescale of the observation. The physical origins of this anomalous sub-diffusion are unresolved, and model systems capable of…
We seek to characterize the motility of mouse fibroblasts on 2D substrates. Utilizing automated tracking techniques, we find that cell trajectories are super-diffusive, where displacements scale faster than t^(1/2) in all directions. Two…
We study L\'evy walks in quenched disordered one-dimensional media, with scatterers spaced according to a long-tailed distribution. By analyzing the scaling relations for the random-walk probability and for the resistivity in the equivalent…
We use computer simulations to study the kinetics and mechanism of proton passage through a narrow-pore carbon-nanotube membrane separating reservoirs of liquid water. Free energy and rate constant calculations show that protons move across…
During the life cycle of bacterial cells the non-mixing of the two ring-shaped daughter genomes is an important prerequisite for the cell division process. Mimicking the environments inside highly crowded biological cells, we study the…
While bacterial swimming has been well characterized in uniform liquid environments, only little is known about how bacteria propagate through complex environments, such as gel-like matrices or porous media that are typically encountered in…
We study the translocation of a flexible polymer through extended patterned pores using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We consider cylindrical and conical pore geometries that can be controlled by the angle of the pore apex $\alpha$.…
We study a single flexible chain molecule grafted to a membrane which has pores of size slightly larger than the monomer size. On both sides of the membrane there is the same solvent. When this solvent is good, i.e. when the polymer is…
The movement of motor particles consisting of one or several molecular motors bound to a cargo particle is studied theoretically. The particles move on patterns of immobilized filaments. Several patterns are described for which the motor…
Aggregation and fragmentation of single molecules in the cell environment lead to a spectrum of diffusivities and to statistical laws of movement very different from typical Brownian motion. Current models of intracellular transport do not…
We show that anomalous diffusion can result when the steps of a random walk are not statistically independent. We present an algorithm that counts all the possible paths of particles diffusing on random graphs with arbitrary degree…
Tracer diffusion in crowded environments is central to many biological and soft matter systems, but quantitative frameworks for linking tracer motion to environmental structure remain limited. Here, we study the transport of rigid tracers…
We investigate theoretically the translocation of structured RNA/DNA molecules through narrow pores which allow single but not double strands to pass. The unzipping of basepaired regions within the molecules presents significant kinetic…
We consider a random walk in confined geometry, starting from a site and eventually reaching a target site. We calculate analytically the distribution of the occupation time on a third site, before reaching the target site. The obtained…
We study the persistent random walk of photons on a one-dimensional lattice of random transmittances. Transmittances at different sites are assumed independent, distributed according to a given probability density $f(t)$. Depending on the…
Cellular membranes are elastic lipid bilayers that contain a variety of proteins, including ion channels, receptors, and scaffolding proteins. These proteins are known to diffuse in the plane of the membrane and to influence the bending of…