Related papers: Muscle contraction and the elasticity-mediated cro…
Actomyosin contractility is essential for biological force generation, and is well understood in highly organized structures such as striated muscle. Additionally, actomyosin bundles devoid of this organization are known to contract both in…
Cells and tissues have the remarkable ability to actively generate the forces required to change their shape. This active mechanical behavior is largely mediated by the actin cytoskeleton, a crosslinked network of actin filaments that is…
Intracellular cargos which are transported by molecular motors move stochastically along cytoskeleton filaments. In particular for bidirectionally transported cargos it is an open question whether the characteristics of their motion can…
Understanding the relationship between muscle activation and thickness deformation is critical for diagnosing muscle-related diseases and monitoring muscle health. Although ultrasound technique can measure muscle thickness change during…
The purpose of this study was to report numerical validation of a 3D finite element model of contracting muscle. The model was based on continuum theory for fibre-reinforced composite materials. Here we simulated contractions for an…
Multilayer edge molecular spintronics device (MEMSD) approach can produce novel logic and memory units for the computers. MEMSD are produced by bridging the molecular channels across the insulator, in the exposed edge region(s) of a…
The cooperative action of many molecular motors is essential for dynamic processes such as cell motility and mitosis. This action can be studied by using motility assays in which the motion of cytoskeletal filaments over a surface coated…
As engineering advances toward the nanoscale, understanding design principles for molecular motors becomes increasingly valuable. Many molecular motors consist of coupled components transducing one free-energy source into another. Here, we…
The mechanism of high-Tc superconductivity is investigated with interests on the microscopic aspects of the condensation energy. The theoretical analysis is performed on the basis of the FLEX approximation which is a microscopic description…
We study the origin of the cooperative nature of spin crossover (SC) between low spin (LS) and high spin (HS) states from the view point of elastic interactions among molecules. As the size of each molecule changes depending on its spin…
The elastic moduli of tissues are connected to their states of health and function. The epithelial monolayer is a simple, minimal, tissue model that is often used to gain understanding of mechanical behavior at the cellular or…
Flagellar motors enable bacteria to navigate their environments by switching rotation direction in response to external cues with high sensitivity. Previous work suggested that ultrasensitivity of the flagellar motor originates from…
The electromigration (EM) of metallic lines is studied in terms of competition between two percolative processes taking place in a random resistor network. The effects associated with the transport of mass and with the consequent growth of…
Over the past two decades, there has been a radical transformation in our ability to extract useful biological signals from the surface electromyogram (EMG). Advances in EMG electrode design and signal processing techniques have resulted in…
Current understanding of how contractility emerges in disordered actomyosin networks of non-muscle cells is still largely based on the intuition derived from earlier works on muscle contractility. This view, however, largely overlooks the…
Willis dynamic homogenization theory revealed that the effective linear momentum of elastic composites is coupled to their effective strain. % This result, which is partially due to asymmetry at the subwavelength scale, implies that…
Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…
Dynamic cooperativity in monomeric enzymes is characterized in terms of a non-Michaelis-Menten kinetic behaviour. The latter is believed to be associated with mechanisms that include multiple reaction pathways due to enzymatic…
Pattern formation and the mechanics of a mixture of actin filaments and myosin motors that is confined by a rigid membrane is investigated. By using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics model, we demonstrate that the competition between the…
Contractile forces exerted on the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM) lead to the alignment and stretching of constituent fibers within the vicinity of cells. As a consequence, the matrix reorganizes to form thick bundles of aligned…