Related papers: Dynamical bond cooperativity enables very fast and…
Sliding friction between two dry surfaces is reasonably described by the speed-independent Amonton-Coulomb friction force law. However, there are many situations where the frictional contact points between two surfaces are "active" and may…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
The cooperative binding of molecular agents onto a substrate is pervasive in living systems. To study whether a system shows cooperativity, one can rely on a fluctuation analysis of quantities such as the number of substrate-bound units and…
The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…
Associative polymer networks have shown a major promise in fabrication of self-healing and responsive materials. The can also serve as simple models to study more complex biological systems where transient interactions play an important…
We study the dynamics of water confined between hydrophobic flat surfaces at low temperature. At different pressures, we observe different behaviors that we understand in terms of the hydrogen bonds dynamics. At high pressure, the formation…
Cooperativity plays an important role in the action of proteins bound to DNA. A simple, mechanical mechanism for cooperativity, in the form of a tension-mediated interaction between proteins bound to DNA at two different locations is…
Active matter systems typically exhibit a trade-off between structural robustness and dynamical freedom, limiting independent control over structure and motion. Here, we show that encoding interactions in a shared field overcomes this…
Controlling interfaces of phase separating fluid mixtures is key to creating diverse functional soft materials. Traditionally, this is accomplished with surface-modifying chemical agents. Using experiment and theory, we study how mechanical…
A model of protein-ligand binding kinetics in which slow solvent dynamics results from hydrophobic drying transitions is investigated. Molecular dynamics simulations show that solvent in the receptor pocket can fluctuate between wet and dry…
We investigate the effects of cooperativity between contagion processes that spread and persist in a host population. We propose and analyze a dynamical model in which individuals that are affected by one transmissible agent $A$ exhibit a…
We demonstrate experimentally dynamic interface binding in a system consisting of two coupled ferromagnetic layers. While domain walls in each layer have different velocity-field responses, for two broad ranges of the driving field, H,…
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…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
We examine the dynamics of hard spheres and discs at high packing fractions in two and three dimensions, modeling the simplest systems exhibiting a glass transition. As it is well known, cooperativity and dynamic heterogeneity arise as…
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…
Biomolecules, such as proteins and RNAs, can phase separate in the cytoplasm of cells to form biomolecular condensates. Such condensates are liquid-like droplets that can wet biological surfaces such as membranes. Many molecules that…
A huge number of technological and biological systems involves the lubricated contact between rough surfaces of soft solids in relative accelerated motion. Examples include dynamical rubber seals and the human joints. In this study we…
Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…
We discuss theoretical models for the cooperative binding dynamics of ligands to substrates, such as dimeric motor proteins to microtubules or more extended macromolecules like tropomyosin to actin filaments. We study the effects of steric…