Related papers: The actin cortex as an active wetting layer
We study active surface wetting using a minimal model of bacteria that takes into account the intrinsic motility diversity of living matter. A mixture of "fast" and "slow" self-propelled Brownian particles is considered in the presence of a…
Recent studies in mammalian hearts show that left ventricular wall thickening is an important mechanism for systolic ejection and that during contraction the cardiac muscle develops significant stresses in the muscular cross-fiber…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
Actin is a key component of the cytoskeleton, which plays central roles in cell motility, division, growth, and tensile strength. To enable this wide range of transient mechanical processes and properties, networks of actin filaments…
Many cell membrane proteins that bind to actin form dynamic clusters driven by contractile flows generated by the actomyosin machinery at the cell cortex. Recent evidence suggests that a necessary condition for the generation of these…
Cellular cortex, which is a highly viscous thin cytoplasmic layer just below the cell membrane, controls the cell's mechanical properties, which can be characterized by a hydrodynamic length scale $\ell$. Cells actively regulate $\ell$ via…
We investigate the geometrical and mechanical properties of adherent cells characterized by a highly anisotropic actin cytoskeleton. Using a combination of theoretical work and experiments on micropillar arrays, we demonstrate that the…
Actin is a globular protein which forms long polar filaments in eukaryotic. The actin filaments play roles of cytoskeleton, motility units , information processing and learning. We model actin filament as a double chain of finite state…
A molecular-dynamics type simulation method, which is suitable for investigating the dewetting dynamics of thin and viscous liquid layers, is discussed. The efficiency of the method is exemplified by studying a two-parameter depinning-like…
Cell monolayers are a central model system to tissue biophysics. In vivo, epithelial tissues are curved on the scale of microns, and curvature's role in the onset of spontaneous tissue flows is still not well-understood. Here, we present a…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells generates forces in conjunction with myosin motor proteins to directly and indirectly drive essential cellular processes. The semiflexible filaments of the cytoskeleton can respond nonlinearly to the…
We propose a model solely based on actin treadmilling and polymerisation which describes many characteristic states of actin wave formation: spots, spirals and travelling waves. In our model, as in experiments on cell recovering motility…
We report the self-assembly of thin actin shells beneath the membranes of giant vesicles. Ion-carrier mediated influx of Mg2+ induces actin polymerization in the initially spherical vesicles. Buckling of the vesicles and the formation of…
It has been observed experimentally that the actin gel grown from spherical beads coated with polymerization enzymes spontaneously breaks the symmetry of its spherical shape, and yields a ``comet'' pushing the bead forward. We propose a…
We perform the analysis of predictions of a classical density functional theory for associating fluids with different association strength concerned with wetting of solid surfaces. The four associating sites water-like models with…
Hypothesis: Although wetting agents have been developed to limit tear film dewetting over contact lenses, systematic analyses correlating wetting agents properties to mechanisms of the tear film destabilization are not readily available.…
The density functional approach for classical associating fluids is used to explore the wetting phase diagrams for model systems consisting of water and graphite-like solid surfaces chemically modified by a small amount of grafted chain…
While actin bundles are used by living cells for structural fortification, the microscopic origin of the elasticity of bundled networks is not understood. Here, we show that above a critical concentration of the actin binding protein…
Cells and tissues exert forces and can actively change shape. This strikingly autonomous behavior is powered by the cytoskeleton, which includes an active gel of actin filaments, crosslinks, and myosin molecular motors. Although individual…
The epidermis is the outermost layer of the skin, and it plays a crucial role in protecting the body from external insults such as UV radiation and physical trauma. The stratum corneum is the topmost layer of the epidermis, composed of dead…