Related papers: Microscopic basis for pattern formation and anomal…
In the presence of ATP, molecular motors generate active force dipoles that drive suspensions of protein filaments far from thermodynamic equilibrium, leading to exotic dynamics and pattern formation. Microscopic modelling can help to…
Motor proteins drive persistent motion and self-organisation of cytoskeletal filaments. However, state-of-the-art microscopy techniques and continuum modelling approaches focus on large length and time scales. Here, we perform…
Using a simple model, we study the fluctuating dynamics of inextensible, semiflexible polar filaments interacting with active and directed force generating centres such as molecular motors. Taking into account the fact that the activity…
Active matter locally converts chemical energy into mechanical work and, for this reason, it provides new mechanisms of pattern formation. In particular, active gels made of protein motors and filaments are far-from-equilibrium systems that…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
Recent experiments reveal both passive subdiffusion of various nanoparticles and anomalous active transport of such particles by molecular motors in the molecularly crowded environment of living biological cells. Passive and active…
Hydrodynamic equations for an isotropic solution of active polar filaments are derived from a microscopic mean-field model of the forces exchanged between motors and filaments. We find that a spatial dependence of the motor stepping rate…
Reconstituted filamentous actin networks with myosin motor proteins form active gels, in which motor proteins generate forces that drive the network far from equilibrium. This motor activity can also strongly affect the network elasticity;…
Active matter systems evade the constraints of thermal equilibrium, leading to the emergence of intriguing collective behavior. A paradigmatic example is given by motor-filament mixtures, where the motion of motor proteins drives alignment…
Active materials with distinctive nonequilibrium properties have diverse materials science applications. Active systems are common in living matter, such as the filament network in the cell that is activated by molecular motors, and in…
Many active materials and biological systems are driven far from equilibrium by embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces and distort the surrounding material. Probing and characterizing these athermal fluctuations is essential for…
We study a model of an active gel of cross-linked semiflexible filaments with additional active linkers such as myosin II clusters. We show that the coupling of the elasticity of the semiflexible filaments to the mechanical properties of…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
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…
Cytoskeletal networks are foundational examples of active matter and central to self-organized structures in the cell. In vivo, these networks are active and heavily crosslinked. Relating their large-scale dynamics to properties of their…
It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular motors…
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 internal dynamics of active gels, both in artificial (in-vitro) model systems and inside the cytoskeleton of living cells, has been extensively studied by experiments of recent years. These dynamics are probed using tracer particles…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells generates forces in conjunction with myosin motor proteins to directly and indirectly drive essential cellular processes. The semiflexible filaments of the cytoskeleton can respond nonlinearly to the…
We present a generic formulation of the continuum elasticity of an isotropic crosslinked active gel. The gel is described by a two-component model consisting of an elastic network coupled frictionally to a permeating fluid. Activity is…