Related papers: Crowding of molecular motors determines microtubul…

We investigate the structure and dynamics of a hard colloid-star polymer mixture in the range of its arrested phase separation, where an incipient demixing transition is interfering with a nearby vitrification line, focusing on the protein…

Polar polymer activity is a fundamental mechanism behind a large number of cellular dynamical processes. The number and location of the active sites on the polymer backbone play a central role in their dynamics and conformational…

The stochastic driving force exerted by a single molecular motor (e.g., a kinesin, or myosin) moving on a periodic molecular track (microtubule, actin filament, etc.) is discussed from a general viewpoint open to experimental test. An…

Living systems often exhibit internal driving: active, molecular processes drive nonequilibrium phenomena such as metabolism or migration. Active gels constitute a fascinating class of internally driven matter, where molecular motors exert…

In this study, a two-state mechanochemical model is presented to describe the dynamic instability of microtubules (MTs) in cells. The MTs switches between two states, assembly state and disassembly state. In assembly state, the growth of…

Macromolecular crowding plays a principal role in a wide range of biological processes including gene expression, chromosomal compaction, and viral infection. However, the impact that crowding has on the dynamics of nucleic acids remains a…

Traffic congestion has long been an ubiquitous problem that is exacerbating with the rapid growth of megacities. In this proof-of-concept work we study intrinsic motivation, implemented via the empowerment principle, to control autonomous…

Microtubules are key structural elements of living cells that are crucial for cell division, intracellular transport and motility. Recent experiments have shown that microtubule severing proteins and molecular motors stimulate the direct…

Microtubules are a major component of the cytoskeleton distinguished by highly dynamic behavior both in vitro and in vivo. We propose a general mathematical model that accounts for the growth, catastrophe, rescue and nucleation processes in…

In a system of noisy self-propelled particles with interactions that favor directional alignment, collective motion will appear if the density of particles is beyond a critical density. Starting with a reduced model for collective motion,…

Using the model for the processive movement of a dimeric kinesin we proposed before, we study the dynamics of a number of mutant homodimeric and heterodimeric kinesins that were constructed by Kaseda et al. (Kaseda, K., Higuchi, H. and…

Protein dynamics in cells may be different from that in dilute solutions in vitro since the environment in cells is highly concentrated with other macromolecules. This volume exclusion due to macromolecular crowding is predicted to affect…

Microtubules are stiff filamentary proteins that constitute an important component of the cytoskeleton of cells. These are known to exhibit a dynamic instability. A steadily growing microtubule can suddenly start depolymerizing very…

Bacteria can adjust the structure of colonies and biofilms to enhance their survival rate under external stress. Here, we explore the link between bacterial interaction forces and colony structure. We show that the activity of extracellular…

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…

An excessive demand of vehicles to a motorway bottleneck leads to traffic jams. Motorbikes are narrow and can drive next to each other in a lane, or in-between lanes in low speeds. This paper analyses the resulting traffic characteristics…

Dimeric molecular motors walk on polar tracks by binding and hydrolyzing one ATP per step. Despite tremendous progress, the waiting state for ATP binding in the well-studied kinesin that walks on microtubule (MT), remains controversial. One…

The interior of cells is crowded thus making it important to assess the effects of macromolecules on the folding of proteins. Using the Self-Organized Polymer (SOP) model, which is a coarse-grained representation of polypeptide chains, we…

A bottleneck situation in one-lane traffic-flow is typically modelled with a constant demand of entering cars. However, in practice this demand may depend on the density of cars in the bottleneck. The present paper studies a simple bimodal…

Packing and crowding are used in biology as mechanisms to (self-)regulate internal molecular or cellular processes based on collective signalling. Here, we study how the transition kinetics of an internal switch of responsive macromolecules…