Related papers: Architecture and Co-Evolution of Allosteric Materi…

Allosteric proteins transmit a mechanical signal induced by binding a ligand. However, understanding the nature of the information transmitted and the architectures optimizing such transmission remains a challenge. Here we show using an…

Allosteric interactions occur when binding at one part of a complex affects the interactions at another part. Allostery offers a high degree of control in multi-species processes, and these interactions play a crucial role in many…

Allosteric effects are often underlying the activity of proteins and elucidating generic design aspects and functional principles which are unique to allosteric phenomena represents a major challenge. Here an approach which consists in the…

The sequence of a protein is not only constrained by its physical and biochemical properties under current selection, but also by features of its past evolutionary history. Understanding the extent and the form that these evolutionary…

Materials that respond to external stimuli by expanding or contracting provide a transduction route that integrates sensing and actuation powered directly by the stimuli. This motivates us to build colloidal scale robots using these…

Long range order and symmetry in heterogeneous materials architected on crystal lattices lead to elastic and inelastic anisotropies and thus limit mechanical functionalities in particular crystallographic directions. Here, we present a…

Heterogeneous materials, such as rocks and concrete, have a complex dynamics including hysteresis, nonlinear elasticity and viscoelasticity. It is very sensitive to microstructural changes and damage. The goal of this paper is to propose a…

The elastic behavior of materials operating in the linear regime is constrained, by definition, to operations that are linear in the imposed deformation. Though the nonlinear regime holds promise for new functionality, the design in this…

Functional soft materials, comprising colloidal and molecular building blocks that self-organize into complex structures as a result of their tunable interactions, enable a wide array of technological applications. Inverse methods provide…

The growth of multicomponent structures in simulations and experiments often results in kinetically trapped, nonequilibrium objects. In such cases we have no general theoretical framework for predicting the outcome of the growth process.…

Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…

In equilibrium, the physical properties of matter are set by the interactions between the constituents. In contrast, the energy input of the individual components controls the behavior of synthetic or living active matter. Great progress…

Materials that behave like machines, e.g. functional materials that are able to change shape in response to external stimuli (Bhattacharya and James, 2005), often do so by exploiting phase transitions. Shape memory materials and the tail…

This paper develops a general data-driven approach to stochastic elastoplastic modelling that leverages atomistic simulation data directly rather than by fitting parameters. The approach is developed in the context of metallic glasses,…

Allostery, the phenomenon by which the perturbation of a molecule at one site alters its behavior at a remote functional site, enables control over biomolecular function. Allosteric modulation is a promising avenue for drug discovery and is…

In allosteric proteins, binding a ligand can affect function at a distant location, for example by changing the binding affinity of a substrate at the active site. The induced fit and population shift models, which differ by the assumed…

Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…

Shape-programmed sheets morph from one surface into another upon activation by stimuli such as illumination, and have attracted much interest for their potential engineering applications, especially in soft robotics. Complex shape changes…

Alignment interactions in active matter are typically modeled as relaxational dynamics toward local consensus. In unbounded systems, this makes alignment effectively decoupled from local density and therefore unable to sustain self-confined…

Growing soft materials which follow a 3D path in space are critical to applications such as search and rescue and minimally invasive surgery. Here, we present a concept for a single-input growing multi-stable soft material, based on a…