Related papers: Motor-free actin bundle contractility driven by mo…

Hydra tissue fragments excised freshly from Hydra body bend spontaneously to some quasi-stable shape in several minutes. We propose that the spontaneous bending is driven mechanically by supracellular actomyosin bundles inherited from…

Actin filaments are conductive to ionic currents, mechanical and voltage solitons. These travelling localisations can be utilised in making the actin network executing specific computing circuits. The propagation of localisations on a…

The conditions under which biological cells switch from a static to a motile state are fundamental to the understanding of many healthy and pathological processes. In this paper, we show that even in the presence of a fully symmetric…

Protein molecules often self-assemble by means of non-covalent physical bonds to form extended filaments, such as amyloids, F-actin, intermediate filaments, and many others. The kinetics of filament growth is limited by the disassembly…

F-actin bundles constitute principal components of a multitude of cytoskeletal processes including stereocilia, filopodia, microvilli, neurosensory bristles, cytoskeletal stress fibers, and the sperm acrosome. The bending, buckling, and…

Adding a small amount of passive (Brownian) particles to a two-dimensional dense suspension of repulsive active Brownian particles does not affect the appearance of a motility-induced phase separation into a dense and a dilute phase, caused…

In presence of non-adsorbing polymers, colloidal particles experience ubiquitous attractive interactions induced by depletion forces. Here, we measure the depletion interaction between a pair of microtubule filaments using a method that…

Cross-linked actomyosin bundles retract when severed in vivo by laser ablation, or when isolated from the cell and micromanipulated in vitro in the presence of ATP. We identify the time scale for contraction as a viscoelastic time tau,…

The influence of an external field acting differently on the two constituents of a binary colloidal mixture performing Brownian dynamics is investigated by computer simulations and a simple theory. In our model, one half of the particles…

The damping of collective rotational motion is investigated by means of particles-rotor model in which the angular momentum coupling is treated exactly and the valence nucleons are in a multi-$j$ shell mean-field. It is found that the onset…

Mechanics has an important role during morphogenesis, both in the generation of forces driving cell shape changes and in determining the effective material properties of cells and tissues. Drosophila dorsal closure (DC) has emerged as a…

We consider a biopolymer bundle consisting of filaments that are crosslinked together. The crosslinks are reversible: they can dynamically bind and unbind adjacent filament pairs as controlled by a binding enthalpy. The bundle is subjected…

Viewed under a fluorescence microscope, the actomyosin cytoskeleton presents vivid streaks of lines together with persistent oscillatory waves. Using an active hydrodynamic approach, we show how a uniform distribution of single or mixture…

Molecular motors and cytoskeletal filaments work collectively most of the time under opposing forces. This opposing force may be due to cargo carried by motors or resistance coming from the cell membrane pressing against the cytoskeletal…

We theoretically study the magnetic excitations in a frustrated two-leg spin-ladder system, in which antiferromagnetic exchange interactions act on the nearest-neighbor and next-nearestneighbor bonds in the leg direction, and on the…

We present a generic theory for the dynamics of a stiff filament under tension, in an active medium with orientational correlations, such as a microtubule in contractile actin. In sharp contrast to the case of a passive medium, we find the…

Filopodia are actin-rich structures, present on the surface of practically every known eukaryotic cell. These structures play a pivotal role in specific cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions by allowing cells to explore their environment,…

Single-molecule pulling experiments on unstructured proteins linked to neurodegenerative diseases have measured rupture forces comparable to those for stable folded proteins. To investigate the structural mechanisms of this unexpected force…

Adding a non-adsorbing polymer to passive colloids induces an attraction between the particles via the `depletion' mechanism. High enough polymer concentrations lead to phase separation. We combine experiments, theory and simulations to…

To theoretically understand force generation properties of actin filaments, many models consider growing filaments pushing against a movable obstacle or barrier. In order to grow, the filaments need space and hence it is necessary to move…