Related papers: Intracellular transport driven by cytoskeletal mot…
Cortical actin networks are highly dynamic and play critical roles in shaping the mechanical properties of cells. The actin cytoskeleton undergoes significant reorganization over the course of the cell cycle, when cortical actin transitions…
In the presence of ATP, molecular motors generate active force dipoles that drive suspensions of protein filaments far from thermodynamic equilibrium, leading to exotic dynamics and pattern formation. Microscopic modelling can help to…
Intracellular transport processes are essential to the healthy development of many organisms as well as more generally to healthy cellular function. The complex dynamics and interactions between protein molecules and filaments on different…
Intracellular cargos which are transported by molecular motors move stochastically along cytoskeleton filaments. In particular for bidirectionally transported cargos it is an open question whether the characteristics of their motion can…
Ion transport in biological tissues is crucial in the study of many biological and pathological problems. Some multi-cellular structures, like smooth muscles on the vessel walls, could be treated as periodic bi-domain structures, which…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
Motivated by recent experiments showing the buckling of microtubules in cells, we study theoretically the mechanical response of, and force propagation along elastic filaments embedded in a non-linear elastic medium. We find that, although…
Microtubules (MTs) represent basic components of a cytoskeleton. The present work studies nonlinear dynamics of MTs assuming tangential oscillations of the dimers. We introduce a two component model and show that the dynamics of MTs can be…
We present a systematic study of the influence of cell geometry on the orientational distribution of microtubules (MTs) nucleated from a single microtubule organizing center (MTOC). For simplicity we consider an elliptical cell geometry, a…
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…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
The traffic of molecular motors through open tube-like compartments is studied using lattice models. These models exhibit boundary-induced phase transitions related to those of the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) in one…
Models of the mind are based on the possibility of computing in brain microtubules. From this point of view, information processing is the fundamental issue for understanding the brain mechanisms that produce consciousness. The cytoskeleton…
The extraction of membrane tubes by molecular motors is known to play an important role for the transport properties of eukaryotic cells. By studying a generic class of models for the tube extraction, we discover a rich phase diagram. In…
The compartmental model is a basic tool for studying signal propagation in neurons, and, if the model parameters are adequately defined, it can also be of help in the study of electrical or fluid transport. Here we show that the input…
Motor proteins display widely different stepping patterns as they move on microtubule tracks, from the deterministic linear or helical motion performed by the protein kinesin to the uncoordinated random steps made by dynein. How these…
Neuronal function requires precise spatial organization of mitochondria to meet localized energetic demand. However, the physical constraints governing mitochondrial transport in axons remain poorly defined. Bidirectional motor-driven…
Many biological functions are executed by molecular machines, which consume energy and convert it into mechanical work. Biological machines have evolved to transport cargo, facilitate folding of proteins and RNA, remodel chromatin and…
Filament based intracellular transport involves the collective action of molecular motor proteins. Experimental evidences suggest that microtubule (MT) filament bound motor proteins such as {\it kinesins} weakly interact among themselves…