Related papers: Collective cargo hauling by a bundle of parallel m…
Intracellular bidirectional transport of cargo on microtubule filaments is achieved by the collective action of oppositely directed dynein and kinesin motors. Experiments have found that in certain cases, inhibiting the activity of one type…
We develop a general theory of microtubule (MT) deformations by molecular motors generating internal force doublets within the MT lattice. We describe two basic internal excitations, the S and V shape, and compare them with experimental…
In growing plant cells, parallel ordering of microtubules (MTs) along the inner surface of the cell membrane influences the direction of cell expansion and thereby plant morphology. For correct expansion of organs that primarily grow by…
Microtubules are key structural elements of living cells that are crucial for cell division, intracellular transport and motility. Recent experiments have shown that microtubule severing proteins and molecular motors stimulate the direct…
In microtubule-based active nematics, motor-driven extensile motion of microtubule bundles powers chaotic large-scale dynamics. We quantify the interfilament sliding motion both in isolated bundles and in a dense active nematic. The…
Here we study a driven lattice gas model for microtubule depolymerizing molecular motors, where traffic jams of motors induce stochastic switching between microtubule growth and shrinkage. We term this phenomenon \enquote{traffic dynamic…
Modeling approaches of suspended, rod-like particles and recent experimental data have shown that depletion forces display different signatures depending on the orientation of these particles. It has been shown that axial attraction of two…
Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…
The cytoskeleton in eukaryotic cells plays several crucial roles. In terms of intracellular transport, motor proteins use the cytoskeletal filaments as a backbone along which they can actively transport biological cargos such as vesicles…
Mixtures of microtubules and molecular motors form active materials with diverse dynamical behaviors that vary based on their constituents' molecular properties. We map the non-equilibrium phase diagram of microtubules and tip-accumulating…
The persistent motion of bacteria produces clusters with a stationary cluster size distribution (CSD). Here we develop a minimal model for bacteria in a narrow channel to assess the relative importance of motility diversity (i.e.…
Background: For faithful chromosome segregation during cell division, correct attachments must be established between sister chromosomes and microtubules from opposite spindle poles through kinetochores (chromosome bi-orientation).…
Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…
In cells, organelles and vesicles are usually transported by cooperation of several motor proteins, including plus-end directed motor kinesin and minus-end directed motor dynein. Many biophysical models have been constructed to understand…
Quantum tunneling dominates coherent transport at low temperatures in many systems of great interest. In this work we report a many--body tunneling (MBT), by nonperturbatively solving the Anderson multi-impurity model, and identify it a…
In this paper, we introduce an ASEP-like transport model for bidirectional motion of particles on a multi-lane lattice. The model is motivated by {\em in vivo} experiments on organelle motility along a microtubule (MT), consisting of…
We analyze theoretically the problem of cargo transport along microtubules by motors of two species with opposite polarities. We consider two different one-dimensional models previously developed in the literature. On the one hand, a quite…
The origins of the large differences observed to the rates with which the diverse particles are conveyed along axonal microtubules are still a matter of debate in the literature. There is evidence that certain neurodegenerative diseases may…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
A novel theoretical model of dynamic instability of a system of linear (1D) microtubules (MTs) in a bounded domain is introduced for studying the role of a cell edge in vivo and analyzing the effect of competition for a limited amount of…