Related papers: Intracellular transport driven by cytoskeletal mot…
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
Molecular motors interacting with cytoskeletal filaments undergo peculiar random walks consisting of alternating sequences of directed movements along the filaments and diffusive motion in the surrounding solution. An ensemble of motors is…
Microtubules (MTs) are important cytoskeletal structures, engaged in a number of specific cellular activities, including vesicular traffic, cell cyto-architecture and motility, cell division, and information processing within neuronal…
We model analytically the dynamics of a cytoskeletal filament in a motility assay. The filament is described as rigid rod free to slide in two dimensions. The motor proteins consist of polymeric tails tethered to the plane and modeled as…
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…
The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously restructuring itself. Enzymatic motors that act on the…
The cell cytoskeleton is a striking example of "active" medium driven out-of-equilibrium by ATP hydrolysis. Such activity has been shown recently to have a spectacular impact on the mechanical and rheological properties of the cellular…
Mechanics and biochemical signaling are both often deregulated in cancer, leading to cancer cell phenotypes that exhibit increased invasiveness, proliferation, and survival. The dynamics and interactions of cytoskeletal components control…
Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Intracellular transport of organelles is fundamental to cell function and health. The mounting evidence suggests that this transport is in fact anomalous. However, the reasons for the anomaly is still under debate. We examined experimental…
Synchronous and directed ciliary beating in trachea allows transport and ejection of virus and dust from the body. This ciliary function depends on the coordinated configuration of basal bodies (root of cilia) in apical cell membrane.…
Large scale motion of cytoplasm called cytoplasmic streaming occurs in some large eukaryotic cells to stir the cell's constituents. In Drosophila oocytes, microtubules have been observed to undergo undulating motion, curving to form…
In many intracellular processes, the length distribution of microtubules is controlled by depolymerizing motor proteins. Experiments have shown that, following non-specific binding to the surface of a microtubule, depolymerizers are…
Regulating physical size is an essential problem that biological organisms must solve from the subcellular to the organismal scales, but it is not well understood what physical principles and mechanisms organisms use to sense and regulate…
Biological nanomachines are nanometer-size macromolecular complexes that catalyze chemical reactions in the presence of substrate molecules. The catalytic functions carried out by such nanomachines in the cytoplasm, and biological membranes…
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
In cells, most of cargos are transported by motor proteins along microtubule. Biophysically, unidirectional motion of large number of motor proteins along a single track can be described by totally asymmetric simple exclusion process…
The cytoskeleton protein actin assembles into large bundles when supporting stresses in the cell, but grows into a fine branched network to induce cell motion. Such self-organization processes are studied in artificial networks of…
In cells and in vitro assays the number of motor proteins involved in biological transport processes is far from being unlimited. The cytoskeletal binding sites are in contact with the same finite reservoir of motors (either the cytosol or…