Related papers: Passive phloem loading and long-distance transport…
In many species, sucrose en route out of the leaf migrates from photosynthetically active mesophyll cells into the phloem down its concentration gradient via plasmodesmata, i.e., symplastically. In some of these plants the process is…
Plants create sugar in the mesophyll cells of their leaves by photosynthesis. This sugar, mostly sucrose, has to be loaded via the bundle sheath into the phloem vascular system (the sieve elements), where it is distributed to growing parts…
The phloem vascular system facilitates transport of energy-rich sugar and signaling molecules in plants, thus permitting long range communication within the organism and growth of non-photosynthesizing organs such as roots and fruits. The…
In plants, osmotically driven flows are believed to be responsible for translocation of sugar in the pipe-like phloem cell network, spanning the entire length of the plant. In this paper, we present an experimental and theoretical study of…
Sucrose is among the main products of photosynthesis that are deemed necessary for plant growth and survival. It is produced in the mesophyll cells of leaves and translocated to different parts of the plant through the phloem. Progress in…
The transport of deformable particles through porous media underlies a wealth of applications ranging from filtration to oil recovery to the transport and spreading of biological agents. Using direct numerical simulations, we analyze the…
In soft porous media, deformation drives solute transport via the intrinsic coupling between flow of the fluid and rearrangement of the pore structure. Solute transport driven by periodic loading, in particular, can be of great relevance in…
Cellular cargo can be bound to cytoskeletal filaments by one or multiple active or passive molecular motors. Recent experiments have shown that the presence of auxiliary, nondriving motors, results in an enhanced processivity of the cargo,…
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…
We perform experimental investigations of osmotically driven flows in artificial microchannels by studying the dynamics and structure of the front of a sugar solution traveling in 200 um wide and 50-200 um deep microchannels. We find that…
We study transport in synthetic, bi-disperse porous structures, with arrays of microchannels interconnected by a nanoporous layer. These structures are inspired by the xylem tissue in vascular plants, in which sap water travels from the…
We consider a thermodynamic state of a solvent and solution separated with an elastic semipermeable membrane in a box with a constant volume and the relevance of this simple model for the water uptake in tall trees. Under moderate…
Anomalously slow passive diffusion, $\langle \delta x^2(t)\rangle\simeq t^{\alpha}$, with $0<\alpha<1$, of larger tracers such as messenger RNA and endogenous submicron granules in the cytoplasm of living biological cells has been…
This experimental study investigates the dynamics of surface washing to remove a passive tracer from a porous plate by a gravity-driven liquid film across its surface. A disodium fluorescein tracer is introduced at the surface of a…
We present pore-scale simulations of two-phase flows in a reconstructed fibrous porous layer. The three dimensional microstructure of the material, a fuel cell gas diffusion layer, is acquired via X-ray computed tomography and used as input…
Advective trapping occurs when solute enters low velocity zones in heterogeneous porous media. Classical local modeling approaches combine the impact of slow advection and diffusion into a hydrodynamic dispersion coefficient and many…
During muscle contraction, myosin motors anchored to thick filaments bind to and slide actin thin filaments. These motors rely on energy derived from ATP, supplied, in part, by diffusion from the sarcoplasm to the interior of the lattice of…
In this work, we investigate the large-scale transport properties of a passive scalar advected by a turbulent fluid, modelled as a superposition of divergence-free vector fields, each weighted by an independent symmetric…
Active materials form a class of far-from-equilibrium systems that are driven internally and exhibit self-organization which can be harnessed to perform mechanical work. Inspired by experiments on synthetic active networks we examine limits…
During phloem unloading, multiple cell-to-cell transport events move organic substances to the root meristem. Although the primary unloading event from the sieve elements to the phloem pole pericycle has been characterized to some extent,…