Related papers: Semiflexible Filamentous Composites
The semiflexible F-actin network of the cytoskeleton is cross-linked by a variety of proteins including filamin, which contain Ig-domains that unfold under applied tension. We examine a simple semiflexible network model cross-linked by such…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
Living matter moves, deforms, and organizes itself. In cells this is made possible by networks of polymer filaments and crosslinking molecules that connect filaments to each other and that act as motors to do mechanical work on the network.…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
Biofilament-motor protein complexes are ubiquitous in biology and drive the transport of cargo vital for many fundamental cellular processes. As they move, motor proteins exert compressive forces on the filaments to which they are attached,…
The longitudinal response of single semiflexible polymers to sudden changes in externally applied forces is known to be controlled by the propagation and relaxation of backbone tension. Under many experimental circumstances, realized, e.g.,…
We study the mechanical and conformational properties of networks of helical polymers with a combination of Monte Carlo simulations based on the Wang-Landau algorithm and the Three-chain Model. We find that the stress-strain behavior of…
Many fibrous materials are modeled as elastic networks featuring a substantial separation between the stiffness scales that characterize different microscopic deformation modes of the network's constituents. This scale separation has been…
Composite materials are often stronger than their constituents. We demonstrate this through a spring network model on a square lattice. Two different types of sites (A and B) are distributed randomly on the lattice, representing two…
Networks with only central force interactions are floppy when their average connectivity is below an isostatic threshold. Although such networks are mechanically unstable, they can become rigid when strained. It was recently shown that the…
Networks of flexible filaments often involve regions of tight contact. Predictively understanding the equilibrium configurations of these systems is challenging due to intricate couplings between topology, geometry, large nonlinear…
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…
Active semiflexible filaments are crucial in various biophysical processes, yet insights into their single-filament behavior have predominantly relied on theory and simulations, owing to the scarcity of controllable synthetic systems. Here,…
The shape of semiflexible polymer rings is studied over their whole range of flexibility. Investigating the joint distribution of asphericity and nature of asphericity as well as their respective averages we find two distinct shape regimes…
Motivated by the observation of the storage of excess elastic free energy - (prestress) -- in cross linked semiflexible networks, we consider the problem of the conformational statistics of a single semiflexible polymer in a quenched random…
In cells, cytoskeletal filament networks are responsible for cell movement, growth, and division. Filaments in the cytoskeleton are driven and organized by crosslinking molecular motors. In reconstituted cytoskeletal systems, motor activity…
We demonstrate that a semiflexible bundle of wormlike chains exhibits a state-dependent bending stiffness that alters fundamentally its scaling behavior with respect to the standard wormlike chain. We explore the equilibrium conformational…
We image semi-flexible polymer networks under shear at the micrometer scale. By tracking embedded probe particles, we determine the local strain field, and directly measure its uniformity, or degree of affineness, on scales of 2-100 micron.…
The conformational properties of a semi-flexible polymer chain, anchored at one end in a uniform force field, are studied in a simple two-dimensional model. Recursion relations are derived for the partition function and then iterated…