Related papers: Generation of stable overlaps between antiparallel…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
Diverse polymer crosslinking techniques allow the synthesis of linear polymer-like structures whose monomers are colloidal particles. In the case where all or part of these colloidal particles are magnetic, one can control the behaviour of…
Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an…
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…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
We have studied the elastic response of actin networks with both compliant and rigid crosslinks by modeling molecular motors as force dipoles. Our finite element simulations show that for compliant crosslinkers such as filamin A, the…
Stripe states in multilayer systems with perpendicular polarization are investigated by analytical calculations within a general continuum approach, applicable to ferromagnetic, ferroelectric, or ferroelastic nanoscale superlattices. The…
We show how to use polar molecules in an optical lattice to engineer quantum spin models with arbitrary spin S >= 1/2 and with interactions featuring a direction-dependent spin anisotropy. This is achieved by encoding the effective spin…
How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
Structure formation and constant reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton are key requirements for the function of living cells. Here we show that a minimal reconstituted system consisting of actin filaments, crosslinking molecules and…
We demonstrate the first fully controlled generation of immobile and slow spatial gap solitons in nonlinear periodic systems with band-gap spectra, and reveal the key features of gap solitons which distinguish them from conventional…
It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular motors…
We study the inhibition of pattern formation in nonlinear optical systems using intracavity photonic crystals. We consider mean field models for single and doubly degenerate optical parametric oscillators. Analytical expressions for the new…
We show that bimodal systems with a spatially nonuniform defocusing cubic nonlinearity, whose strength grows toward the periphery, can support stable two-component solitons. For a sufficiently strong XPM interaction, vector solitons with…
We study self-assembly in suspensions of supracolloidal polymer-like structures made of crosslinked magnetic particles. Inspired by self-assembly motifs observed for dipolar hard spheres, we focus on four different topologies of the…
The traffic of molecular motors which interact through mutual exclusion is studied theoretically for half-open tube-like compartments. These half-open tubes mimic the shapes of axons. The mutual exclusion leads to traffic jams or density…
We demonstrate strong coupling between molecular excited states and surface plasmon modes of a slit array in a thin metal film. The coupling manifests itself as an anti-crossing behavior of the two newly formed polaritons. As the coupling…
We derive a model describing spatio-temporal organization of an array of microtubules interacting via molecular motors. Starting from a stochastic model of inelastic polar rods with a generic anisotropic interaction kernel we obtain a set…
Incorporating cells within active biomaterial scaffolds is a promising strategy to develop forefront materials that can autonomously sense, respond, and alter the scaffold in response to environmental cues or internal cell circuitry. Using…
Bundles of stiff filaments are ubiquitous in the living world, found both in the cytoskeleton and in the extracellular medium. These bundles are typically held together by smaller cross-linking molecules. We demonstrate analytically,…