Related papers: An Accurate Numerical Solution to the Kinetics of …
By means of multicanonical computer simulations, we investigate thermodynamic properties of the aggregation of interacting semiflexible polymers. We analyze a mesoscopic bead-stick model, where nonbonded monomers interact via Lennard-Jones…
Using lattice models we explore the factors that determine the tendencies of polypeptide chains to aggregate by exhaustively sampling the sequence and conformational space. The morphologies of the fibril-like structures and the time scales…
Protein amyloidosis is a cytopathological process characterized by the formation of highly beta-sheet-rich fibrils. How this process occurs and how to prevent/treat the associated diseases are not completely understood. Here, we carry out a…
Growth-fragmentation processes describe the evolution of systems of cells which grow continuously and fragment suddenly; they are used in models of cell division and protein polymerisation. Typically, we may expect that in the long run, the…
Assembly of protein complexes like virus shells, the centriole, the nuclear pore complex or the actin cytoskeleton is strongly determined by their spatial structure. Moreover it is becoming increasingly clear that the reversible nature of…
Polymerization of dendritic actin networks underlies important mechanical processes in cell biology such as the protrusion of lamellipodia, propulsion of growth cones in dendrites of neurons, intracellular transport of organelles and…
We investigate the length distribution of self-assembled, long and stiff polymers at thermal equilibrium. Our analysis is based on calculating the partition functions of stiff polymers of variable lengths in the elastic regime. Our…
Ample experimental evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that the formation of monodispersed colloids proceeds through a more complex mechanism, than the generally excepted diffusional "burst nucleation" process. Instead, the…
Amyloid fibrils are stable aggregates of misfolded proteins and polypeptides that are insoluble and resistant to protease activity. Abnormal formation of amyloid fibrils in vivo may lead to neurodegenerative disorders and other systemic…
We theoretically study the transport properties of self-propelled particles on complex structures, such as motor proteins on filament networks. A general master equation formalism is developed to investigate the persistent motion of…
The biopolymers actin and microtubules are often in an ongoing assembling/disassembling state far from thermal equilibrium. Above a critical density this leads to spatially periodic patterns, as shown by a scaling argument and in terms of a…
Recent experimental studies have shown that amyloid fibril formed by aggregation of {\beta} peptide exhibits excellent mechanical properties comparable to other protein materials such as actin filaments and microtubules. These excellent…
Actin is a key component of the cytoskeleton, which plays central roles in cell motility, division, growth, and tensile strength. To enable this wide range of transient mechanical processes and properties, networks of actin filaments…
In this paper, existence and uniqueness of solutions to a non-linear, initial value problem is studied. In particular, we consider a special type of problem which physically represents the time evolution of particle number density resulted…
We present a quantitative measure of physical complexity, based on the amount of information required to build a given physical structure through self-assembly. Our procedure can be adapted to any given geometry, and thus to any given type…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
We investigate general properties of non-deterministic self-assembly with asymmetric interactions, using a computational model and DNA tile assembly experiments. By contrasting symmetric and asymmetric interactions we show that the latter…
The growth of bacterial flagellar filaments is a self-assembly process where flagellin molecules are transported through the narrow core of the flagellum and are added at the distal end. To model this situation, we generalize a growth…
An important goal of self-assembly is to achieve a preprogrammed structure with high fidelity. Here, we control the valence of DNA-functionalized emulsions to make linear and branched model polymers, or `colloidomers'. The distribution of…
Protein assembly plays an important role throughout all phyla of life, both physiologically and pathologically. In particular, aggregation and polymerization of proteins are key-strategies that regulate cellular function. In recent years,…