Related papers: Confotronic Dynamics of Tubular Lattices
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
Starting from the hypothesis that the tubulin dimer is a conformationally bistable molecule - fluctuating between a curved and a straight configuration at room temperature - we develop a model for polymorphic dynamics of the microtubule…
Microtubules have been in biophysical focus for several decades. Yet the confusing and mutually contradicting results regarding their elasticity and fluctuations have shed some doubts on their present understanding. In this paper we expose…
Carefully designed nanostructures can inspire new type of optomechanical interactions and allow surpassing limitations set by classical diffractive optical elements. Apart from strong near-field localization, nanostructured environment…
Microtubules are a major component of the cytoskeleton distinguished by highly dynamic behavior both in vitro and in vivo. We propose a general mathematical model that accounts for the growth, catastrophe, rescue and nucleation processes in…
Advances in nanotechnology lead to an increasing interest in how nanoparticles interact with biomembranes. Nanoparticles are wrapped spontaneously by biomembranes if the adhesive interactions between the particles and membranes compensate…
The presence of nanoparticles in a diblock copolymer leads to changes in the morphology and properties of the matrix and can produce highly organized hybrid materials. The resulting material properties depend not only on the polymer…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
Microtubules are an essential physical building block of cellular systems. They are organized using specific crosslinkers, motors, and influencers of nucleation and growth. With the addition of anti-parallel crosslinkers, microtubule…
Point-like motile topological defects control the universal dynamics of diverse two-dimensional active nematics ranging from shaken granular rods to cellular monolayers. A comparable understanding in higher dimensions has yet to emerge. We…
In this paper a quantum mechanical description of the assembly/disassembly process for microtubules is proposed. We introduce creation and annihilation operators that raise or lower the microtubule length by a tubulin layer. Following that,…
Microtubules, major elements of the cell skeleton are, most of the time, well organized in vivo, but they can also show self-organizing behaviors in time and/or space in purified solutions in vitro. Theoretical studies and models based on…
The fate of every eukaryotic cell subtly relies on the exceptional mechanical properties of microtubules. Despite significant efforts, understanding their unusual mechanics remains elusive. One persistent, unresolved mystery is the…
Membrane tubulation is a ubiquitous process that occurs both at the plasma membrane and on the membranes of intracellular organelles. These tubulation events are known to be mediated by forces applied on the membrane either due to motor…
Bundles of filamentous polymers are primary structural components of a broad range of cytoskeletal structures, and their mechanical properties play key roles in cellular functions ranging from locomotion to mechanotransduction and…
We show that the formation of membrane tubes (or membrane tethers), which is a crucial step in many biological processes, is highly non-trivial and involves first order shape transitions. The force exerted by an emerging tube is a…
Microtubules (MTs) represent basic components of a cytoskeleton. The present work studies nonlinear dynamics of MTs assuming tangential oscillations of the dimers. We introduce a two component model and show that the dynamics of MTs can be…
The remaining dynamical degrees of freedom of molecular fluids confined into capillaries of nano to sub-nanometer diameter are of fundamental relevance for future developments in the field of nanofluidics. These properties cannot be simply…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…
The collective dynamics of topological structures have been of great interest from both fundamental and applied perspectives. For example, the studies of dynamical properties of magnetic vortices and skyrmions not only deepened the…