Related papers: Nonlocal actin orientation models select for a uni…
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…
Diffusion-driven instability is a fundamental mechanism underlying pattern formation in spatially extended systems. In almost all existing works, diffusion across the links of the underlying network is modeled through scalar weights,…
The interaction between actin filaments and microtubules is crucial for many eukaryotic cellular processes, such as, among others, cell polarization, cell motility and cellular wound healing. The importance of this interaction has long been…
This paper explores the fundamental limits of a simple system, inspired by the intermittent Kalman filtering model, where the actuation direction is drawn uniformly from the unit hypersphere. The model allows us to focus on a fundamental…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
The growth of actin filament networks is a fundamental biological process that drives a variety of cellular and intracellular motions. During motility, eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens are propelled by actin networks organized…
We use optical tweezers microrheology and fluorescence microscopy to apply nonlinear microscale strains to entangled and crosslinked actin networks, and measure the resulting stress and actin filament deformations. We couple nonlinear…
Many patterning events in multi-cellular organisms rely on cell-to-cell contact signaling, such as the Notch pathway in metazoans. A particularly interesting phenomenon in this form of communication is lateral inhibition where a cell that…
Dynamic multilayer networks frequently represent the structure of multiple co-evolving relations; however, statistical models are not well-developed for this prevalent network type. Here, we propose a new latent space model for dynamic…
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.…
Collective cell migration is crucial in many biological processes such as wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and tumor progression. The leading front of a collective migrating epithelial cell layer often destabilizes into multicellular…
The fluid-structure interactions between flexible fibers and viscous flows play an essential role in various biological phenomena, medical problems, and industrial processes. Of particular interest is the case of particles freely…
Cell spreading and motility on an adhesive substrate are driven by the active physical forces generated by the actin cytoskeleton. We have recently shown that coupling curved membrane complexes to protrusive forces, exerted by the actin…
A unique pattern selection in the absolutely unstable regime of a driven, nonlinear, open-flow system is analyzed: The spatiotemporal structures of rotationally symmetric vortices that propagate downstream in the annulus of the rotating…
Pattern formation often occurs in confined systems, yet how boundaries shape patterning dynamics is unclear. We develop techniques to analyze confinement effects in nonlocal advection-diffusion equations, which generically capture the…
Ordered, collective motions commonly arise spontaneously in systems of many interacting, active units, ranging from cellular tissues and bacterial colonies to self-propelled colloids and animal flocks. Active phases are especially rich when…
Throughout developmental biology and ecology, transport can be driven by nonlocal interactions. Examples include cells that migrate based on contact with pseudopodia extended from other cells, and animals that move based on their vision of…
This paper deals with the Toner-Tu (TT) model, which is a hydrodynamic model describing the collective motion of numerous self-propelled agents. We analytically study the global-in-time well-posedness of the TT model near the steady-state…
In this paper we propose an existence and uniqueness theory for the solutions of a system of non-linear hyperbolic conservation laws, structured in age and maturity variables, representing a tissue environment. In particular we are…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…