Related papers: Spontaneous sarcomere dynamics
Active phenomena which involve force generation and motion play a key role in a number of phenomena in living cells such as cell motility, muscle contraction and the active transport of material and organelles. Here we discuss mechanical…
Assembly and stability of mitotic spindle is governed by the interplay of various intra-cellular forces, e.g. the forces generated by motor proteins by sliding overlapping anti-parallel microtubules (MTs) polymerized from the opposite…
Actin filaments, crosslinkers and myosin molecular motors form contractile networks. For instance, the cell cortex is a thin network below the cell membrane ; contraction of the cell cortex allows cells to round up during cell division.…
We explore the dynamics of an integrate-and-fire neuron with an oscillatory stimulus. The frustration due to the competition between the neuron's natural firing period and that of the oscillatory rhythm, leads to a rich structure of…
In this paper, dynamical systems theory and bifurcation theory are applied to investi- gate the rich dynamical behaviours observed in three simple disease models. The 2- and 3-dimensional models we investigate have arisen in previous…
We consider the influence of active speed fluctuations on the dynamics of a $d$-dimensional active Brownian particle performing a persistent stochastic motion. We use the Laplace transform of the Fokker-Planck equation to obtain exact…
This work continues the analysis of complex dynamics in a class of bidimensional nonlinear hybrid dynamical systems with resets modeling neuronal voltage dynamics with adaptation and spike emission. We show that these models can generically…
In this work, we investigate a model of an adaptive networked dynamical system, where the coupling strengths among phase oscillators coevolve with the phase states. It is shown that in this model the oscillators can spontaneously…
Time-resolved single-molecule biophysical experiments yield data that contain a wealth of dynamic information, in addition to the equilibrium distributions derived from histograms of the time series. In typical force spectroscopic setups…
The pervasive phenomenon of friction has been studied at the nanoscale by controlled manipulation of single atoms and molecules, which permitted a precise determination of the static friction force necessary to initiate motion. However,…
Mechanically induced unfolding of passive crosslinkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon encountered across the scales from individual macro-molecules to cytoskeletal actin networks. In this paper we study a conceptual model of…
Living cells move thanks to assemblies of actin filaments and myosin motors that range from very organized striated muscle tissue to disordered intracellular bundles. The mechanisms powering these disordered structures are debated, and all…
Understanding how stick-slip dynamics manifests in diverse physical conditions is a crucial topic in tribology. Although it has been extensively studied in simple frictional configurations, the characterization of stick-slip behavior in…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
The involuntary force fluctuations associated with physiological (as distinct from pathological) tremor are an unavoidable component of human motor control. While the origins of the physiological tremor are known to depend on muscle…
We perform one and two-parameter numerical bifurcation analysis of a mechanotransduction model approximating the dynamics of mesenchymal stem cell differentiation into neurons, adipocytes, myocytes and osteoblasts. For our analysis, we use…
This study investigates the existence and stability of limit cycles resulting from self-excited oscillations in linear multi-degree-of-freedom systems subjected to discontinuous, state-dependent forcing. Using the method of averaging and…
For many physical systems the transition from a stationary solution to sustained small amplitude oscillations corresponds to a Hopf bifurcation. For systems involving impacts, thresholds, switches, or other abrupt events, however, this…
We investigate how the dynamics of a single chain influences the kinetics of early stage phase separation in a symmetric binary polymer mixture. We consider quenches from the disordered phase into the region of spinodal instability. On a…
Contractility in animal cells is often generated by molecular motors such as myosin, which require polar substrates for their function. Motivated by recent experimental evidence of motor-independent contractility, we propose a robust…