Related papers: Continuum Electrostatics in Cell Biology
Successful cell division requires a tight regulation of chromosome motion via the activity of molecular motors. Many of the key players at the origin of the forces generating the movement have been identified, but their spatial and temporal…
Voltage and charge distributions in cellular microdomains regulate communications, excitability, and signal transduction. We report here new electrical laws in a cell, which follow from a nonlinear electro-diffusion model. These newly…
A suspension of nanoparticles with very low volume fraction is found to assemble into a macroscopic cellular phase under the collective influence of AC and DC voltages. Systematic study of this phase transition shows that it was the result…
Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…
We derive formulae for the electrostatic interaction between two long, rigid macromolecules that may have arbitrary surface charge patterns and cross at an arbitrary interaxial angle. We calculate the dependence of the interaction energy on…
Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…
We present a new kinetic equation for cell migration driven by mechanical interactions with the substrate, an effect not previously captured in kinetic models, and essential for explaining observed collective behaviors such as those in…
It is shown that the consideration of the density of states variation in nanoscale electrochemical systems yields modulations in the rate constant and concomitant electrical currents. The proposed models extend the utility of…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
Both classical and quantum electrodynamics predict the existence of dipole-dipole long-range electrodynamic intermolecular forces; however, these have never been hitherto experimentally observed. The discovery of completely new and…
The phase transition kinetics in three phase systems was investigated using the numerically efficient cell dynamics method. A phasefield model with a simple analytical free energy and single order parameter was used to study the kinetics…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Before cell division, two identical copies of chromosomes are pulled apart by microtubule (MT) filaments that approach the chromosomes from the opposite poles a mitotic spindle. Connection between the MTs and the chromosomes are mediated by…
A continuum electromechanical model is proposed to describe the membrane curvature induced by electrostatic interactions in a solvated protein-membrane system. The model couples the macroscopic strain energy of membrane and the…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
We study interactions between biological cells that apply anisotropic active mechanical forces on an elastic substrate. We model the cells as thin discs that along their perimeters apply radial, but angle-dependent forces on the substrate.…
Electrostatics plays a key role in biomolecular assembly. Oppositely charged biomolecules, for instance, can co-assembled into functional units, such as DNA and histone proteins into nucleosomes and actin-binding protein complexes into…
In vivo, eukaryotic cells are embedded in a matrix environment, where they grow and develop. Generally, this extracellular matrix (ECM) is an anisotropic fibrous structure, through which macromolecules and biochemical signaling molecules at…
The mitotic spindle is an important intermediate structure in eukaryotic cell division, in which each of a pair of duplicated chromosomes is attached through microtubules to centrosomal bodies located close to the two poles of the dividing…
For the first time the phenomenon of cellular structure coarsening are consistently analysed from the positions of kinetic, hydrodynamic and stochastodynamic theories of nonequilibrium statistical systems. Thereby micro-, meso- and…