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Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Fibrinogen is a protein found in blood that forms Fibrin polymer network to build a clot during wound healing process when there is a cut in the blood vessel. The fibrin fiber is highly stretchable and shows a complex mechanical properties.…
Amyloidosis is a protein misfolding disease caused by the deposition of large, insoluble aggregates (amyloid fibrils) of protein in a tissue, which has been associated with various conditions, such as lymphoid disorders, Alzheimer's…
Self-assembly of polypeptides into fibrillar structures can be initiated by planar surfaces that interact favorably with certain residues. Using a coarse grained model, we systematically studied the folding and adsorption behavior of a…
From the pragmatic to the symbolic, textiles play a prominent role in some of the most demanding yet ubiquitous scenarios, such as covering the complex and dynamic geometries of the human body. Textiles are made by repeated manipulations 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…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and plays crucial roles in biology, medicine, physics and materials science. Understanding and controlling chirality is therefore an important research challenge with broad implications in fundamental and…
The mechanical integrity of arteries is of prime importance, for a proper oxygen and nutrients delivery to all organs. To optimize their mechanical properties, healthy arteries exhibit a complex hierarchical microstructure which ensures a…
Filamentous cyanobacteria are one of the oldest and today still most abundant lifeforms on earth, with manifold implications in ecology and economics. Their flexible filaments, often several hundred cells long, exhibit gliding motility in…
Granular jamming has been identified as a fundamental mechanism for the operation of robotic grippers. In this work, we show, that soft particles like expanded polystyrene beads lead to significantly larger gripping forces in comparison to…
Thermally actuated twisted and coiled polymer (TCP) artificial muscles exhibit exceptional specific work capacities but are limited by an inherent competition between load-bearing capacity and actuation stroke. To address this limitation,…
Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) offer an efficient and accurate framework for large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, effectively bridging the gap between classical force fields and \textit{ab initio} methods. In…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
Amyloid proteins are associated with a broad spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases. However, it remains a grand challenge to extract molecular structure information from intracellular amyloid proteins in their native cellular environment.…
The mechanical yield of dense granular materials is a fascinating rheological phenomenon, beyond which stress no longer increases with strain at a sufficiently large deformation. Understanding the behavior of mechanical responses associated…
Colloidal gels are formed through the aggregation of attractive particles, whose size ranges from 10~nm to a few micrometers, suspended in a liquid. Such gels are ubiquitous in everyday life applications, from food products to paints or…
Bilayer membranes self-assembled from amphiphilic molecules such as lipids, surfactants and block copolymers are ubiquitous in biological and physiochemical systems. The shape and structure of bilayer membranes depend crucially on their…
We study the compression of bundles of aligned macroscopic fibers with intrinsic shape disorder, as found in human hair and in many other natural and man-made systems. We show by a combination of experiments, numerical simulations and…
We study swelling and structural properties of ionic microgel suspensions within a comprehensive coarse-grained model that combines the polymeric and colloidal natures of microgels as permeable, compressible, charged spheres governed by…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…