Related papers: Aging of dynamically stabilized microtubules
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
In the cellular phenomena of cytoplasmic streaming, molecular motors carrying cargo along a network of microtubules entrain the surrounding fluid. The piconewton forces produced by individual motors are sufficient to deform long…
Aging includes both continuous gradual decline from microscopic mechanisms together with major deficit onset events such as morbidity, disability and ultimately death. These deficit events are stochastic, obscuring the connection between…
Intermediate filaments form an essential structural network, spread throughout the cytoplasm and play a key role in cell mechanics, intracellular organization and molecular signaling. The maintenance of the network and its adaptation to the…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
A multiphasic constitutive model of the skin that implicitly accounts for the process of intrinsic (i.e.\ chronological) ageing via variation of the constitutive parameters is proposed. The structurally-motivated constitutive formulation…
We analyze experimental observations of microtubules undergoing small fluctuations about a "balance point" when mixed in solution of two different kinesin motor proteins, KLP61F and Ncd. It has been proposed that the microtubule movement is…
A new class of micromechanically motivated chain network models for soft biological tissues is presented. On the microlevel, it is based on the statistics of long chain molecules. A wormlike chain model is applied to capture the behavior of…
The dynamics of microcapsules in steady shear flow was studied using a theoretical approach based on three variables: The Taylor deformation parameter $\alpha_{\rm D}$, the inclination angle $\theta$, and the phase angle $\phi$ of the…
A simple stochastic model which describes microtubule dynamics and explicitly takes into account the relevant biochemical processes is presented. The model incorporates binding and unbinding of monomers and random phosphate release inside…
Cytoskeletal filaments are capable of self-assembly in the absence of externally supplied chemical energy, but the rapid turnover rates essential for their biological function require a constant flux of ATP or GTP hydrolysis. The same is…
Tubular lattices are ubiquitous in nature and technology. Microtubules and nanotubes of all kinds act as important pillars of biological cells and the man-made nano-world. We show that when prestress is introduced in such structures,…
Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…
We use multi-speckle diffusive wave spectroscopy (MSDWS) to probe the micron-scale dynamics of a granular pile submitted to discrete gentle taps. The typical time-scale between plastic events is found to increase dramatically with the…
The expansion of deleted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) molecules has been linked to ageing, particularly in skeletal muscle fibres; its mechanism has remained unclear for three decades. Previous accounts assigned a replicative advantage to the…
Microtubules, the primary components of the chromosome segregation machinery, are stabilized by longitudinal and lateral non-covalent bonds between the tubulin subunits. However, the thermodynamics of these bonds and the microtubule…
The non-equilibrium dynamics of a one-dimensional Ising model with uniform, short-ranged three-spin interactions is investigated. It is shown that this model possesses an exponentially large number of metastable configurations that are…
The cytoskeleton is an important subsystem of cells that is involved for example in cell division and locomotion. It consists of filaments that are cross-linked by molecular motors that can induce relative sliding between filaments and…
We present a physical mechanism that can cause the mitotic spindle to oscillate. The driving force for this mechanism emerges from the polymerization of astral microtubules interacting with the cell cortex. We show that Brownian ratchet…
We propose a new model based on the Ising model with the aim to study synaptic plasticity phenomena in neural networks. It is today well established in biology that the synapses or connections between certain types of neurons are…