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Actin and myosin drive many instances of force generation, deformation, and shape change in cells, tissues, and organisms. In particular, cytoskeletal actomyosin is remarkable in its adaptive architecture, responding to a host of…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an…
The activities and interactions of proteins that govern the cellular response to a signal generate a multitude of protein phosphorylation states and heterogeneous protein complexes. Here, using a computational model that accounts for 307…
Living cells inherently reorganize their intracellular structures in response to mechanical cues from their environment. Among these responses, the formation of actin-based stress fibers exhibits a series of structural transitions depending…
Biological systems encode function not primarily in steady states, but in the structure of transient responses elicited by time-varying stimuli. Overshoots, biphasic dynamics, adaptation kinetics, fold-change detection, entrainment, and…
The perception and recognition of the surroundings is one of the essential tasks for a robot. With preliminary knowledge about a target object, it can perform various manipulation tasks such as rolling motion, palpation, and force control.…
Mechanical stretching of secondary structures is studied through molecular dynamics simulations of a Go-like model. Force vs. displacement curves are studied as a function of the stiffness and velocity of the pulling device. The succession…
The assumption of linear response of protein molecules to thermal noise or structural perturbations, such as ligand binding or detachment, is broadly used in the studies of protein dynamics. Conformational motions in proteins are…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
Using light as a probe to detect a mechanical motion is one of the most successful experimental approaches in physics. The history of mechanical sensing based on the reflection, refraction and scattering of light dates back to the 16th…
Many types of peripheral and transmembrane proteins can sense and generate membrane curvature. Laterally isotropic proteins and crescent proteins with twofold rotational symmetry, such as Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs superfamily proteins, have been…
The family of TGFb ligands is large and its members are involved in many different signaling processes. These signaling processes strongly differ in type with TGFb ligands eliciting both sustained or transient responses. Members of the TGFb…
Immune cells recognize and discriminate antigens through immunological synapses - dynamic intercellular junctions exhibiting highly organized receptor-ligand patterns. While much work has focused on molecular kinetics and passive mechanisms…
Mechanical metamaterials are designed to enable unique functionalities, but are typically limited by an initial energy state and require an independent energy input to function repeatedly. Our study introduces a theoretical active…
Many morphogenetic processes involve mechanical rearrangement of epithelial tissues that is driven by precisely regulated cytoskeletal forces and cell adhesion. The mechanical state of the cell and intercellular adhesion are not only the…
To survive environmental conditions, cells transcribe their response activities into encoded mRNA sequences in order to produce certain amounts of protein concentrations. The external conditions are mapped into the cell through the…
Living cells respond to spatial signals. Signal transmission to the cell interior often involves the release of second messengers like $Ca^{2+}$ . They will eventually trigger a physiological response by activating kinases that in turn…
We consider six different secondary structures of proteins and construct two types of Go-type off-lattice models: with the steric constraints and without. The basic aminoacid-aminoacid potential is Lennard Jones for the native contacts and…
Cells sense external concentrations and, via biochemical signaling, respond by regulating the expression of target proteins. Both in signaling networks and gene regulation there are two main mechanisms by which the concentration can be…