Related papers: Patterning active materials with addressable soft …
The actin cytoskeleton is a key component in the machinery of eukaryotic cells, and it selfassembles out of equilibrium into a wide variety of biologically crucial structures. While the molecular mechanisms involved are well characterized,…
Intracellular cargo transport can arise from passive diffusion, active motor-driven transport along cytoskeletal filament networks, and passive advection by fluid flows entrained by such motor/cargo motion. Active and advective transport…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
Biological active matter like the cytoskeleton or tissues are characterized by their ability to transform chemical energy into mechanical stress. In addition, it often exhibits orientational order, which is essential for many cellular and…
In vitro reconstituted active systems, such as the ATP-driven microtubule bundle suspension developed by the Dogic group, provide a fertile testing ground for elucidating the phenomenology of active liquid crystalline states. Controlling…
Cytoskeletal motor proteins are involved in major intracellular transport processes which are vital for maintaining appropriate cellular function. The motor exhibits distinct states of motility: active motion along filaments, and…
Inside cells, various cargos are transported by teams of molecular motors. Intriguingly, the motors involved generally have opposite pulling directions, and the resulting cargo dynamics is a biased stochastic motion. It is an open question…
Surface-driven flows are ubiquitous in nature, from subcellular cytoplasmic streaming to organ-scale ciliary arrays. Here, we model how confined geometries can be used to engineer complex hydrodynamic patterns driven by activity prescribed…
We propose a class of microstructurally informed models for the linear elastic mechanical behavior of cross-linked polymer networks such as the actin cytoskeleton. Salient features of the models include the possibility to represent…
Molecular motors perform active movements along cytoskeletal filaments and drive the traffic of organelles and other cargo particles in cells. In contrast to the macroscopic traffic of cars, however, the traffic of molecular motors is…
A paradigm for internally driven matter is the active nematic liquid crystal, whereby the equations of a conventional nematic are supplemented by a minimal active stress that violates time reversal symmetry. In practice, active fluids may…
The mechanics of complex soft matter often cannot be understood in the classical physical frame of flexible polymers or rigid rods. The underlying constituents are semiflexible polymers, whose finite bending stiffness ($\kappa$) leads to…
I show the assumed Bilayer structure of cell membranes is Topologically falsified by known aminophospholipid dynamics in metabolically-active, Far from Equilibrium cells. The sensitivity of lipid and cytoplasmic flows to temperature,…
We derive the constitutive equations of an active polar gel from a model for the dynamics of elastic molecules that link polar elements. Molecular binding kinetics induces the fluidization of the material, giving rise to Maxwell…
Molecular motors are macromolecular complexes which use some form of input energy to perform mechanical work. The filamentary tracks, on which these motors move, are made of either proteins (e.g., microtubules) or nucleic acids (DNA or…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
The interplay between cytoskeletal architecture and the nonlinearity of the interactions due to bucklable filaments plays a key role in modulating the cell's mechanical stability and affecting its structural rearrangements. We study a model…
Conventional kinesin is a dimeric motor protein that transports membranous organelles toward the plus-end of microtubules (MTs). Individual kinesin dimers show steadfast directionality and hundreds of consecutive steps, yetthe detailed…
Migration of animal cells is based on the interplay between actin polymerization at the front, adhesion along the cell-substrate interface, and actomyosin contractility at the back. Active gel theory has been used before to demonstrate that…