Related papers: Spontaneous waves in muscle fibres
Active phenomena which involve force generation and motion play a key role in a number of phenomena in living cells such as cell motility, muscle contraction and the active transport of material and organelles. Here we discuss mechanical…
The feedback between mechanical and chemical signals plays a key role in controlling many biological processes and collective cell behavior. Here we focus on the emergence of spatiotemporal density waves in a one-dimensional "cell train."…
Sarcomeres are the basic force generating units of striated muscles and consist of an interdigitating arrangement of actin and myosin filaments. While muscle contraction is usually triggered by neural signals, which eventually set myosin…
Oscillations represent a ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. The conventional models of biological periodic oscillations are usually proposed as interconnecting transcriptional feedback loops. Some specific proteins function as…
Motile cilia are slender, hair-like cellular appendages that spontaneously oscillate under the action of internal molecular motors and are typically found in dense arrays. These active filaments coordinate their beating to generate…
Sensory hair cells in auditory and vestibular organs rely on active mechanisms to achieve high sensitivity and frequency selectivity. Recent experimental studies have documented self-sustained oscillations in hair cells of lower vertebrates…
We analyze a simple stochastic model to describe motor molecules which cooperate in large groups and present a physical mechanism which can lead to oscillatory motion if the motors are elastically coupled to their environment. Beyond a…
Generation of mechanical oscillation is ubiquitous to wide variety of intracellular processes. We show that catchbonding behaviour of motor proteins provides a generic mechanism of generating spontaneous oscillations in motor-cytoskeletal…
The spontaneous generation of electrical activity underpins a number of essential physiological processes, and is observed even in tissues where specialized pacemaker cells have not been identified. The emergence of periodic oscillations in…
The eukaryotic flagellum beats periodically, driven by the oscillatory dynamics of molecular motors, to propel cells and pump fluids. Small, but perceivable fluctuations in the beat of individual flagella have physiological implications for…
A recent surge of discoveries has sparked significant interest in active systems where a particle moves autonomously in resonance with its self-generated wave field, leading to notable wave-mediated effects including new propulsion…
Excitable media are systems which are at rest in the absence of external input but which respond to a sufficiently strong stimulus by sending a wave of "excitation" across the medium. Examples include cardiac and cortical tissue, and in…
Spontaneous directed motion, a hallmark of cell biology, is unusual in classical statistical physics. Here we study, using both numerical and analytical methods, organized motion in models of the cytoskeleton in which constituents are…
Cilia and flagella are hair-like extensions of eukaryotic cells which generate oscillatory beat patterns that can propel micro-organisms and create fluid flows near cellular surfaces. The evolutionary highly conserved core of cilia and…
Broadband spontaneous macroscopic neural oscillations are rhythmic cortical firing which were extensively examined during the last century, however, their possible origination is still controversial. In this work we show how macroscopic…
Mounting evidence shows that oscillatory activity is widespread in cell signaling. Here we review some of this recent evidence, focusing on both the molecular mechanisms that potentially underlie such dynamical behavior, and the potential…
Autonomous oscillations in biological systems may have a biochemical origin or result from an interplay between force-generating and visco-elastic elements. In molecular motor assemblies the force-generating elements are molecular engines…
We study wave propagation in networks of coupled cells which can behave as excitable or self-oscillatory media. For excitable media, an asymptotic construction of wave trains is presented. This construction predicts their shape and speed,…
Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…
We discuss a two-dimensional model for the dynamics of axonemal deformations driven by internally generated forces of molecular motors. Our model consists of an elastic filament pair connected by active elements. We derive the dynamic…