Related papers: Physics of muscle contraction
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
Spatiotemporal patterns are common in biological systems. For electrically-coupled cells previous studies of pattern formation have mainly used external forcing as the main bifurcation parameter. The purpose of this paper is to show that…
While disproven by S. Carnot 200 years ago, corpuscularianism (the philosophy that the states of individual molecules determine the state of a system of those molecules) is still widely used to describe biological function. Nowhere is this…
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,…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
Material renewability in active living systems, such as in cells and tissues, can drive the large-scale patterning of forces, with distinctive phenotypic consequences. This is especially significant in the cell cytoskeleton, where multiple…
The reaction-diffusion models have been extensively applied to explain the mechanism of pattern formations in early embryogenesis based on geometrically confined microtissues consisting of human pluripotent stem cells. Recently, mechanical…
The growth of a tissue, which depends on cell-cell interactions and biologically relevant process such as cell division and apoptosis, is regulated by a mechanical feedback mechanism. We account for these effects in a minimal…
In Part I of this article we have developed a novel mechanobiological model of a Tissue Engineering process that accounts for the mechanisms through which an isotropic or anisotropic adherence condition regulates the active functions of the…
Active gels perform key mechanical roles inside the cell, such as cell division, motion and force sensing. The unique mechanical properties required to perform such functions arise from the interactions between molecular motors and…
We discuss theoretical models for the cooperative binding dynamics of ligands to substrates, such as dimeric motor proteins to microtubules or more extended macromolecules like tropomyosin to actin filaments. We study the effects of steric…
Neither of the two prevalent theories, namely thermodynamic stability and kinetic stability, provides a comprehensive understanding of protein folding. The thermodynamic theory is misleading because it assumes that free energy is the…
Protein-ligand interactions are crucial for a wide range of physiological processes. Many cellular functions result in these non-covalent `bonds' being mechanically strained, and this can be integral to proper cellular function. Broadly,…
Active solids such as cell collectives, colloidal clusters, and active metamaterials exhibit diverse collective phenomena, ranging from rigid body motion to shape-changing mechanisms. The nonlinear dynamics of such active materials remains…
The motion involved in barrier crossing for protein folding are investigated in terms of the chain dynamics of the polymer backbone, completing the microscopic description of protein folding presented in the previous paper. Local reaction…
The interaction of the actin cytoskeleton with cell-substrate adhesions is necessary for cell migration. While the trajectories of motile cells have a stochastic character, investigations of cell motility mechanisms rarely elaborate on the…
Simple two-state folding kinetics of many small single-domain proteins are characterized by chevron plots with linear folding and unfolding arms consistent with a two-state description of equilibrium thermodynamics. This phenomenon is…
The theory of biochemical processes needs simple but realistic models of phenomena underlying microscopic dynamics of proteins. Many experiments performed in the 1980s have demonstrated that within the protein native state, apart from usual…
We propose four novel mathematical models, describing the microscopic mechanisms of force generation in the cardiac muscle tissue, which are suitable for multiscale numerical simulations of cardiac electromechanics. Such models are based on…