Related papers: Muscle contraction and the elasticity-mediated cro…
Myosin II plays a pivotal role in muscle contraction by generating force through the cooperative action of multiple motors on actin filaments. In this study, we integrate the nonlinear elasticity of the neck linker in individual myosin II…
Regulation of contraction in striated muscle is controlled by a dual mechanism involving both thin filaments containing actin and thick filaments containing myosin. The thin filament is activated by calcium ions binding to troponin, leading…
Many biological processes involve the action of molecular motors that interact with the cell cytoskeleton. Some processes, such as the transport of cargoes is achieved mainly by the action of individual motors. Other, such as cell motility…
We study the influence of filament elasticity on the motion of collective molecular motors. It is found that for a backbone flexibility exceeding a characteristic value (motor stiffness divided through the mean displacement between attached…
Force fluctuations exhibited in focal adhesions (FAs) that connect a cell to its extracellular environment, point to the complex role of the underlying machinery that controls cell migration. To elucidate the explicit role of myosin motors…
Sarcomeres are the basic force generating units of striated muscles and consist of an interdigitating arrangement of actin and myosin filaments. While muscle contraction is usually triggered by neural signals, which eventually set myosin…
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 paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an…
Non-processive molecular motors have to work together in ensembles in order to generate appreciable levels of force or movement. In skeletal muscle, for example, hundreds of myosin II molecules cooperate in thick filaments. In non-muscle…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
An actin filament contacting myosin molecules as a functional unit of muscle contraction induces magnetic dipoles along the filament when ATP molecules to be hydrolyzed are available there. The induced magnetic dipoles are coherent over the…
The deep inelastic scattering cross section for scattering from bound nucleons differs from that of free nucleons.This phenomena, first discovered 30 years ago, is known as the EMC effect and is still not fully understood. Recent analysis…
Heterogeneous mechanical dyskinesis during acute myocardial ischaemia is thought to contribute to arrhythmogenic alterations to cardiac electrophysiology. Various forms of mechano-electric coupling (MEC) mechanisms have been suggested to…
Crosslinks and molecular motors play an important role in the organization of cytoskeletal filament networks. Here we incorporate the effect of crosslinks into our model of polar motor-filament organization [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 71}, 050901…
Forces in the actin cytoskeleton are generated by small groups of non-processive myosin II motors for which stochastic effects are highly relevant. Using a crossbridge model with the assumptions of fast powerstroke kinetics and equal load…
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…
Enzymatic molecules that actively support many cellular processes, including transport, cell division and cell motility, are known as motor proteins or molecular motors. Experimental studies indicate that they interact with each other and…
We study a model of an active gel of cross-linked semiflexible filaments with additional active linkers such as myosin II clusters. We show that the coupling of the elasticity of the semiflexible filaments to the mechanical properties of…