Related papers: Heterogeneous Force Chains in Cellularized Biopoly…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
Because the constant extension ensemble of single chain molecule is not always equivalent with constant force ensemble, a model of double-stranded conformations, as in RNA molecules and $\beta$-sheets in proteins, with fixed extension…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Biochemical networks are used in computational biology, to model the static and dynamical details of systems involved in cell signaling, metabolism, and regulation of gene expression. Parametric and structural uncertainty, as well as…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
The measurement of cellular traction forces on soft elastic substrates has become a standard tool for many labs working on mechanobiology. Here we review the basic principles and different variants of this approach. In general, the…
Dense granular materials and other particle aggregates transmit stress in a manner that belies their microstructural disorder. A subset of the particle contact network is strikingly coherent, wherein contacts are aligned nearly linearly and…
Previous research on semiflexible polymers including cytoskeletal networks in cells has suggested the existence of distinct regimes of elastic response, in which the strain field is either uniform (affine) or non-uniform (non-affine) under…
The complexity of the cells can be described and understood by a number of networks such as protein-protein interaction, cytoskeletal, organelle, signalling, gene transcription and metabolic networks. All these networks are highly dynamic…
Actin networks, acting as an engine pushing against an external load, are fundamentally important to cell motility. A measure of the effectiveness of an engine is the velocity the engine is able to produce at a given force, the…
Animal cells use traction forces to sense the mechanics and geometry of their environment. Measuring these traction forces requires a workflow combining cell experiments, image processing and force reconstruction based on elasticity theory.…
Chain molecules play important roles in industry and in living cells. Our focus here is on distinct ways of modeling the stiffness inherent in a chain molecule. We consider three types of stiffnesses -- one yielding an energy penalty for…
In biological systems, the growth of cells, tissues, and organs is influenced by mechanical cues. Locally, cell growth leads to a mechanically heterogeneous environment as cells pull and push their neighbors in a cell network. Despite this…
Although the stretching of polymers and biomolecules is important in numerous settings, their response when confined to two-dimensions is relatively poorly-studied. In this paper, we derive closed-form analytical expressions for the…
An efficient numerical framework is presented for modeling viscoelasticity and permanent set of polymers. It is based on the hereditary integral form of transient network theory, in which polymer chains belong to distinct networks each with…
Fibrous networks such as collagen are common in physiological systems. One important function of these networks is to provide mechanical stability for cells and tissues. At physiological levels of connectivity, such networks would be…
We develop a microscopic biophysical model for self-organization and reshaping of artificial tissue, that is co-driven by microscopic active forces between cells and extracellular matrix (ECM), and macroscopic forces that develop within the…
The stress response of polymer double networks depends not only on the properties of the constituent networks, but also on the interactions arising between them. Here we demonstrate, via coarse-grained simulations, that both their global…
Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical…
We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension…