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Biological networks are customarily described as structurally robust. This means that they often function extremely well under large forms of perturbations affecting both the concentrations and the kinetic parameters. In order to explain…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…
Semiflexible biopolymer networks are commonly found in biological systems, from the cytoskeleton of cells to the extracellular matrix. Such networks often naturally occur as composites, in which various components interact to generate rich…
Analyzing nonlinear conformational relaxation dynamics in elastic networks corresponding to two classical motor proteins, we find that they respond by well-defined internal mechanical motions to various initial deformations and that these…
The mechanical properties of cells are dominated by the cytoskeleton, an interconnected network of long elastic filaments. The connections between the filaments are provided by crosslinking proteins, which constitute, next to the filaments,…
Living matter moves, deforms, and organizes itself. In cells this is made possible by networks of polymer filaments and crosslinking molecules that connect filaments to each other and that act as motors to do mechanical work on the network.…
The contractile motion of the heart is strongly determined by the distribution of the fibers that constitute cardiac tissue. Strain analysis informed with the orientation of fibers allows to describe several pathologies that are typically…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
Cells sense the geometry and stiffness of their adhesive environment by active contractility. For strong adhesion to flat substrates, two-dimensional contractile network models can be used to understand how force is distributed throughout…
Modeling the behavior of coupled networks is challenging due to their intricate dynamics. For example in neuroscience, it is of critical importance to understand the relationship between the functional neural processes and anatomical…
The brain's connectome and the vascular system are examples of physical networks whose tangible nature influences their structure, layout, and ultimately their function. The material resources required to build and maintain these networks…
Many biological materials consist of sparse networks of disordered fibres, embedded in a soft elastic matrix. The interplay between rigid and soft elements in such composite networks leads to mechanical properties that can go far beyond the…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
Constitutive modeling lies at the core of mechanics, allowing us to map strains onto stresses for a material in a given mechanical setting. Historically, researchers relied on phenomenological modeling where simple mathematical…
The past decade has witnessed the development and success of coarse-grained network models of proteins for predicting many equilibrium properties related to collective modes of motion. Curiously, the results are usually robust towards the…
Computer simulations can aid in understanding how collective materials properties emerge from interactions between simple constituents. Here, we introduce a coarse-grained model that enables simulation of networks of actin filaments, myosin…
Data-driven constitutive modeling with neural networks has received increased interest in recent years due to its ability to easily incorporate physical and mechanistic constraints and to overcome the challenging and time-consuming task of…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
The production of mechanical stresses in living organisms largely relies on localized, force-generating active units embedded in filamentous matrices. Numerical simulations of discrete fiber networks with fixed boundaries have shown that…
Mesh-like structures, such as mucus gel or cytoskeleton networks, are ubiquitous in biological systems. These intricate structures are composed of cross-linked, semi-flexible bio-filaments, crucial to numerous biological processes. In many…