Related papers: Undulations in a weakly interacting mechanically g…
How frictional effects emerge at the microscopic level in particulate materials remains a challenging question, particularly in systems subject to thermal fluctuations due to the transient nature of interparticle contacts. Here, we directly…
An elastic rod model for semi-flexible polymers is presented. Theory for a continuum rod is reviewed, and it is shown that a popular discretised model used in numerical simulations gives the correct continuum limit. Correlation functions…
Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…
Biological transport is supported by collective dynamics of enzymatic molecules that are called motor proteins or molecular motors. Experiments suggest that motor proteins interact locally via short-range potentials. We investigate the…
Making use of a simplified model for protein folding, it can be shown that conformations which are particularly stable when their energy is minimized with respect to amino acid sequence (in the sense that they display a large energy gap to…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
The homeostasis of epithelial tissue relies on a balance between the self-renewal of stem cell populations, cellular differentiation, and loss. Although this balance needs to be tightly regulated to avoid pathologies, such as tumor growth,…
Time-resolved single-molecule biophysical experiments yield data that contain a wealth of dynamic information, in addition to the equilibrium distributions derived from histograms of the time series. In typical force spectroscopic setups…
Although the stretching of polymers and biomolecules is important in numerous settings, their response when confined to two-dimensions is relatively poorly-studied. In this paper, we derive closed-form analytical expressions for the…
A discrete-to-continuum analysis for free-boundary problems related to crystalline films deposited on substrates is performed by $\Gamma$-convergence. The discrete model here introduced is characterized by an energy with two contributions,…
A new model is proposed to explain coiling of myelins composed of fluid bilayers. This model allows the constituent bilayer cylinders of a myelin to be non-coaxial and the bilayer lateral tension to vary from bilayer to bilayer. The…
The DNA molecule is modeled by a parabola embedded chain with long-range interactions between twisted base pair dipoles. A mechanism for bubble generation is presented and investigated in two different configurations. Using random normally…
We use thermodynamic perturbation theory to calculate the free energies and resulting phase diagrams of binary systems of spherical colloidal particles and interacting polymer coils in good solvent within an effective one-component…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
We propose a general multiscale approach for the mechanical behavior of three-dimensional networks of macromolecules undergoing strain-induced unfolding. Starting from a (statistically based) energetic analysis of the macromolecule…
This work introduces a methodology for the statistical mechanical analysis of polymeric chains under tension controlled by optical or magnetic tweezers at thermal equilibrium with an embedding fluid medium. The response of single bonds…
Contacts between particles in dense, sheared suspensions are believed to underpin much of their rheology. Roughness and adhesion are known to constrain the relative motion of particles, and thus globally affect the shear response, but an…
Natural slender structures, such as plant leaves, petals, and tendrils, often exhibit complex three-dimensional (3D) morphologies-including twisting, helical coiling, and saddle-bending-driven by differential growth. The resulting internal…
A hydrophilic liquid, such as water, forms hydrogen bonds with a hydrophilic substrate. The strength and locality of the hydrogen bonding interactions prohibit slip of the liquid over the substrate. The question then arises how the contact…