Related papers: The switching dynamics of the bacterial flagellar …
The swimming motility of bacteria is driven by the action of bacterial flagellar motors, whose outermost structure is a long and thin helicoidal filament. When rotated, the fluid medium exerts an anisotropic viscous drag on the flagellar…
While often believed to be a passive agent that merely exploits its host's metabolism, influenza virus has recently been shown to actively move across glycan-coated surfaces. This form of enzymatically driven surface motility is currently…
Active matter systems evade the constraints of thermal equilibrium, leading to the emergence of intriguing collective behavior. A paradigmatic example is given by motor-filament mixtures, where the motion of motor proteins drives alignment…
Molecular rotors form twisted conformations upon photoexcitation, with their fluorescent relaxation time serving as a measure of viscosity. They have been used to assess membrane viscosities but yield higher values compared to other…
Multistable gene regulatory systems sustain different levels of gene expression under identical external conditions. Such multistability is used to encode phenotypic states in processes including nutrient uptake and persistence in bacteria,…
DNA inversion is an important mechanism by which bacteria and bacteriophage switch reversibly between phenotypic states. In such switches, the orientation of a short DNA element is flipped by a site-specific recombinase enzyme. We propose a…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
Molecular motors are in charge of almost every process in the life cycle of cells, such as protein synthesis, DNA replication, and cell locomotion, hence being of crucial importance for understanding the cellular dynamics. However, given…
Flagellated bacteria exploiting helical propulsion are known to swim along circular trajectories near surfaces. Fluid dynamics predicts this circular motion to be clockwise (CW) above a rigid surface (when viewed from inside the fluid) and…
We examine the dependence of the physical quantities of the rotatory molecular motor, such as the rotation velocity and the proton translocation rate, on the chemical reaction rate using the model based only on diffusion process. A peculiar…
We investigate the dependence of the displacements of a molecular motor embedded inside a glassy material on its folding characteristic time. We observe two different time regimes. For slow foldings (regime I) the diffusion evolves very…
We provide evidence that the energy landscapes of folded proteins do not shift with temperature, but the onset of functional dynamics is associated with its effective sampling. The motion of the backbone is described by three distinct…
Protein dynamics is a fundamental element to comprehend their biological functions. However, a theoretical picture providing microscopic-detail explanation of its relevant features is still missing. One of the outmost relevant properties…
The bending of cilia and flagella is driven by forces generated by dynein motor proteins. These forces slide adjacent microtubule doublets within the axoneme, the motile cytoskeletal structure. To create regular, oscilla- tory beating…
Motile bacteria are a wonder of nature's engineering: microscopic engines that transduce biochemical energy into the work they require to explore their environment. This added energy turns the surrounding fluid into a bath that departs from…
Sperm modulate their flagellar symmetry to navigate through complex physico-chemical environments and achieve reproductive function. Yet it remains elusive how sperm swim forwards despite the inherent asymmetry of several components that…
The collective behavior of molecular motor proteins have been investigated in the literature using models to describe the long-time dynamics of a unidimensional continuum motor distribution. Here, we consider the phenomena related to the…
The origin of biological motion can be traced back to the function of molecular motor proteins. Cytoplasmic dynein and kinesin transport organelles within our cells moving along a polymeric filament, the microtubule. The motion of 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…