Related papers: Tensile Forces and Shape Entropy Explain Observed …
During morphogenesis, the shape of a tissue emerges from collective cellular behaviors, which are in part regulated by mechanical and biochemical interactions between cells. Quantification of force and stress is therefore necessary to…
Nucleosomes form the basic unit of compaction within eukaryotic genomes and their locations represent an important, yet poorly understood, mechanism of genetic regulation. Quantifying the strength of interactions within the nucleosome is a…
Configurational entropy is an important factor in the free energy change of many macromolecular recognition and binding processes, and has been intensively studied. Despite great progresses that have been made, the global sampling remains…
Equilibrating proteins and other biomacromolecules is cardinal for molecular dynamics simulation of such biological systems in which they perform free dynamics without any externally-applied mechanical constraint, until thermodynamic…
Membrane wrapping underlies nanoparticle uptake during endocytosis, whereas the reverse process of membrane unwrapping accompanies particle expulsion and membrane fusion events. Existing theoretical descriptions typically focus on adhesion…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
We investigate the role of entropic concepts for the relaxation dynamics in granular systems. In these systems the existence of a geometrical frustration induces a drastic modification of the allowed phase space, which in its turn induces a…
We present a molecular dynamics study of force patterns, tensile strength and crack formation in a cohesive granular model where the particles are subjected to swelling or shrinkage gradients. Non-uniform particle size change generates…
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,…
We study the shapes of elastic membranes under the simultaneous exertion of tensile and compressive forces when the translational symmetry along the tension direction is broken. We predict a multitude of novel morphological phases in…
Endocytosis is an essential process by which cells internalize a piece of plasma membrane and material from the outside. In cells with turgor, pressure opposes membrane defor- mations, and increases the amount of force that has to be…
Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…
The vertex model is a popular framework for modelling tightly packed biological cells, such as confluent epithelia. Cells are described by convex polygons tiling the plane and their equilibrium is found by minimizing a global mechanical…
The folding ability of a heteropolymer model for proteins subject to Monte Carlo dynamics on a simple cubic lattice is shown to be strongly correlated with the energy gap between the native state and the structurally dissimilar part of the…
Many morphogenetic processes involve mechanical rearrangement of epithelial tissues that is driven by precisely regulated cytoskeletal forces and cell adhesion. The mechanical state of the cell and intercellular adhesion are not only the…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
Torsional-space Monte Carlo simulations of flexible molecules are usually based on the assumption that all values of dihedral angles have equal probability in the absence of atomic interactions. In the present paper it is shown that this…
A combination of fundamental measure density functional theory and Monte Carlo computer simulation is used to determine the orientation-resolved interfacial tension and stiffness for the equilibrium hard-sphere crystal-fluid interface.…
The thermodynamic properties of DNA circular molecules are investigated by a new path integral computational method which treats in the real space the fundamental forces stabilizing the molecule. The base pair and stacking contributions to…
There has been considerable controversy regarding the structure of TiBe$_{12}$, which is variously reported as hexagonal and tetragonal. Lattice dynamics simulations based on density functional theory show the tetragonal phase space group…