Related papers: Active contractility in actomyosin networks
Cellular migration is crucial for biological processes including embryonic development, immune response, and wound healing. The myosin-clutch model is a framework that describes how cells control migration through the interactions between…
Cadherin adhesion receptors are fundamental determinants of tissue organization in health and disease. Increasingly, we have come to appreciate that classical cadherins exert their biological actions through active cooperation with the…
The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously restructuring itself. Enzymatic motors that act on the…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells has many types of crosslinkers. The mechanical interplay between these different crosslinker types is an open issue in cytoskeletal mechanics. We develop a framework to study the cooperativity and…
During animal development and homeostasis, the structure of tissues, including muscles, blood vessels and connective tissues adapts to mechanical strains in the extracellular matrix (ECM). These strains originate from the differential…
Stress fibers are contractile actomyosin bundles commonly observed in the cytoskeleton of metazoan cells. The spatial profile of the polarity of actin filaments inside contractile actomyosin bundles is either monotonic (graded) or periodic…
Actin is one of the most studied cytoskeleton proteins showing a very rich span of structures. It can self-assemble actively into dynamical structures that govern the mechanical properties of the cell, its motility and its division.…
The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
Myosin motor proteins drive vigorous steady-state fluctuations in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. Endogenous embedded semiflexible filaments such as microtubules, or added filaments such as single-walled carbon nanotubes are used as novel…
The dynamics of many macromolecular machines is characterized by chemically-mediated structural changes that achieve large scale functional deployment through local rearrangements of constitutive protein sub-units. Motivated by recent high…
The actin cytoskeleton of adherent tissue cells often condenses into filament bundles contracted by myosin motors, so-called stress fibers, which play a crucial role in the mechanical interaction of cells with their environment. Stress…
Internally generated active stresses drive soft materials into architectures inaccessible to thermal self-assembly. We use a microtubule-based active fluid to assemble and irreversibly restructure actin-fascin networks. Subsequently, we…
Animal cells form contractile structures to promote various functions, from cell motility to cell division. Force generation in these structures is often due to molecular motors such as myosin that require polar substrates for their…
The identification of forces and stresses is a central task in biophysics research: Knowledge on forces is key to understanding dynamic processes in active biological systems that are able to self-organize and display emergent properties by…
The actin cytoskeleton is remarkably adaptable and multifunctional. It often organizes into nematic bundles such as contractile rings or stress fibers. However, how a uniform and isotropic actin gel self-organizes into dense nematic bundles…
Polymerization of dendritic actin networks underlies important mechanical processes in cell biology such as the protrusion of lamellipodia, propulsion of growth cones in dendrites of neurons, intracellular transport of organelles and…
The nucleus of the eukaryotic cell functions amidst active cytoskeletal filaments, but its response to the stresses carried by these filaments is largely unexplored. We report here the results of studies of the translational and rotational…
We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…
Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…