Related papers: Oscillatory fluid flow drives scaling of contracti…
We investigate the hovering dynamics of rigid bodies with up-down asymmetry placed in oscillating background flows. Recent experiments on inanimate pyramid-shaped objects in oscillating flows with zero mean component demonstrate that the…
Cord-forming fungi form extensive networks that continuously adapt to maintain an efficient transport system. As osmotically driven water uptake is often distal from the tips, and aqueous fluids are incompressible, we propose that growth…
Structure formation and constant reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton are key requirements for the function of living cells. Here we show that a minimal reconstituted system consisting of actin filaments, crosslinking molecules and…
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…
Incompressible fluids in microfluidic networks with non-rigid channels can exhibit flow rate oscillations analogous to electric current oscillations in RLC circuits. This is due to the elastic deformation of channel walls that can store and…
The actomyosin cortex is an active material that provides animal cells with a strong but flexible exterior, whose mechanics, including non-Gaussian fluctuations and occasional large displacements or cytoquakes, have defied explanation. We…
Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…
Tissue remodelling in diverse developmental contexts require cell shape changes that have been associated with pulsation and flow of the actomyosin cytoskeleton. Here we describe the dynamics of the actomyosin cytoskeleton as a confined…
Fully developed turbulence is a universal and scale-invariant chaotic state characterized by an energy cascade from large to small scales where the cascade is eventually arrested by dissipation. In this article, we show how to harness these…
Biological systems can rely on collective formation of a metachronal wave in an ensemble of oscillators for locomotion and for fluid transport. We consider one-dimensional chains of phase oscillators with nearest neighbor interactions,…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
Branched flow governs the transition from ballistic to diffusive motion of waves and conservative particle flows in spatially correlated random or complex environments. It occurs in many physical systems from micrometer to interstellar…
Periodically forced, oscillatory fluid flows have been the focus of intense research for decades due to their richness as a nonlinear dynamical system and their relevance to applications in transportation, aeronautics, and energy…
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.…
Complex fluids flow in complex ways in complex structures. Transport of water and various organic and inorganic molecules in the central nervous system are important in a wide range of biological and medical processes [C. Nicholson, and S.…
The amoeboid organism, the plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum, behaves on the basis of spatio-temporal pattern formation by local contraction-oscillators. This biological system can be regarded as a reaction-diffusion system which has…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Stress generation by the actin cytoskeleton shapes cells and tissues. Despite impressive progress in live imaging and quantitative physical descriptions of cytoskeletal network dynamics, the connection between processes at molecular scales…
Active stresses in biological cells and tissues drive many developmental processes. However, increasing experimental evidence suggests that additional mechanical interactions with surrounding material can play a crucial role in guiding…
Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions such as proliferation, motility, and cell death, and such cellular systems are…