Related papers: Functionality of disorder in muscle mechanics

Skeletal muscles are living tissues that can undergo large deformations in short periods of time and that can be activated to produce force. In this paper we use the principles of continuum mechanics to propose a dynamic, fully non-linear,…

Structural hierarchy, in which materials possess distinct features on multiple length scales, is ubiquitous in nature; diverse biological materials, such as bone, cellulose, and muscle, have as many as ten hierarchical levels. Structural…

Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…

Actin filaments, crosslinkers and myosin molecular motors form contractile networks. For instance, the cell cortex is a thin network below the cell membrane ; contraction of the cell cortex allows cells to round up during cell division.…

Sarcomeres are the basic force generating units of striated muscles and consist of an interdigitating arrangement of actin and myosin filaments. While muscle contraction is usually triggered by neural signals, which eventually set myosin…

Biological functions rely on ordered structures and intricately controlled collective dynamics. In contrast to systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, order is typically established and sustained in stationary states by continuous dissipation…

Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…

We study the possibility of efficient intermittent locomotion for two-link bodies that slide by changing their interlink angle periodically in time. We find that the anisotropy ratio of the sliding friction coefficients is a key parameter,…

The rigidity of elastic networks depends sensitively on their internal connectivity and the nature of the interactions between constituents. Particles interacting via central forces undergo a zero-temperature rigidity-percolation transition…

Disordered viscoelastic materials are ubiquitous and exhibit fascinating invariant scaling properties. In a companion article, we have presented comprehensive new results for the critical behavior of the dynamic susceptibility of disordered…

We analyze the localization properties of two dimensional systems based on partite lattices with a basis. Contrary to standard results, we find that a band of critical states emerges for systems in the unitary class A preserving spin…

Crosslinked semi-flexible and flexible filaments that are actively deformed by molecular motors occur in various natural settings, such as the ordered eukaryotic flagellum, and the disordered cytoskeleton. The deformation of these composite…

Biofilament-motor protein complexes are ubiquitous in biology and drive the transport of cargo vital for many fundamental cellular processes. As they move, motor proteins exert compressive forces on the filaments to which they are attached,…

Continuum elasticity is a powerful tool applicable in a broad range of physical systems and phenomena. Yet, understanding how and on what scales material disorder may lead to the breakdown of continuum elasticity is not fully understood. We…

In spin systems such as the Ising model, the local order and disorder can be characterized by the order-parameter and energy density profiles $\langle \sigma ({\bf r}_1) \rangle$ and $\langle \epsilon ({\bf r}_2) \rangle$, respectively.…

The rigidity transition occurs when, as the density of microscopic components is increased, a disordered medium becomes able to transmit and ensure macroscopic mechanical stability, owing to the appearance of a space-spanning rigid…

Predicting when rupture occurs or cracks progress is a major challenge in numerous elds of industrial, societal and geophysical importance. It remains largely unsolved: Stress enhancement at cracks and defects, indeed, makes the macroscale…

Collagen fibrils are the most important structural component of tendons. Their crimped structure and parallel arrangement within the tendon lead to a distinctive non-linear stress-strain curve when a tendon is stretched. Microstructural…

The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…

Suspensions of actively driven anisotropic objects exhibit distinctively nonequilibrium behaviors, and current theories predict that they are incapable of sustaining orientational order at high activity. By contrast, here we show that…