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Background: Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of human African sleeping sickness and Nagana in cattle. In addition to being an important pathogen T. brucei has developed into a model system in cell biology. Results: Using Stable…
Magnetic tweezers are used to study the mechanical response under torsion of single nucleosome arrays reconstituted on tandem repeats of 5S positioning sequences. Regular arrays are extremely resilient and can reversibly accommodate a large…
Viscoelastic subdiffusion governed by a fractional Langevin equation is studied numerically in a random Gaussian environment modeled by stationary Gaussian potentials with decaying spatial correlations. This anomalous diffusion is…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
Voronoi tessellations have been used to model the geometric arrangement of cells in morphogenetic or cancerous tissues, however so far only with flat hypersurfaces as cell-cell contact borders. In order to reproduce the experimentally…
In the pathogenic parasite Trypanosoma brucei, a laterally attached flagellum drives rapid deformation of the complex cell body, producing puzzling dynamics. High-speed defocusing imaging reveals that surface points trace flower-like…
We present a rotationally invariant viscous vertex model that accounts for both cortical and bulk dissipation of cells. The vanishing substrate-friction limit is enforced via Lagrange multipliers, which also provides a framework for…
Understanding dynamic and complex interaction of biological membranes with extracellular matrices plays a crucial role in controlling a variety of cell behavior and functions, from cell adhesion and growth to signaling and differentiation.…
Mucin glycoprotein consist of tandem repeating glycosylated regions flanked by non-repetitive protein domains with little glycosylation. These non-repetitive domains are involved in the pH dependent gelation of gastric mucin, which is…
We consider problem of constructing purely Voronoi mesh where the union of uncut Voronoi cells approximates the planar computational domain with piecewise-smooth boundary. Smooth boundary fragments are approximated by the Voronoi edges and…
Bacterial genomes have been shown to be partitioned into several kilobases long chromosomal domains that are topologically independent from each other, meaning that change of DNA superhelicity in one domain does not propagate to neighbors.…
Twisted multilayer systems, encompassing materials like twisted bilayer graphene (TBG), twisted trilayer graphene, and twisted bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides, have garnered significant attention in condensed matter physics.…
We present a comprehensive first-principles study of twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) for a wide range of twist angles, with a focus on structural and electronic properties. By employing density functional theory (DFT) with an optimized…
Viruses are biological nanosystems with a capsid of protein-made capsomer units that encloses and protects the genetic material responsible for their replication. Here we show how the geometrical constraints of the capsomer-capsomer…
Cellular structures manifest their outstanding mechanical properties in many biological systems. One key challenge for designing and optimizing these geometrically complicated structures lies in devising an effective geometric…
Assessing the structural properties of large proteins is important to gain an understanding of their function in, e.g., biological systems or biomedical applications. We propose a method to examine the mechanical properties of proteins…
Single-stranded RNA viruses co-assemble their capsid with the genome and variations in capsid structures can have significant functional relevance. In particular, viruses need to respond to a dehydrating environment to prevent genomic…
Lipid structures exhibit complex and highly dynamic lateral structure; and changes in lipid density and fluidity are believed to play an essential role in membrane targeting and function. The dynamic structure of liquids on the molecular…
We numerically investigate the hydrodynamics and membrane dynamics of multicomponent vesicles in two strongly confined geometries. This serves as a simplified model for red blood cells undergoing large deformations while traversing narrow…
The Stratum Corneum (SC), the outermost layer of skin, comprises rigid corneocytes (keratin filled dead cells) in a specialized lipid matrix. The continuous lipid matrix provides the main barrier against uncontrolled water loss and invasion…