Related papers: Physics of muscle contraction
Cytoskeletal networks, which are essentially motor-filament assemblies, play a major role in many developmental processes involving structural remodeling and shape changes. These are achieved by nonequilibrium self-organization processes…
We use computer simulations to investigate self-assembly in a system of model chaperonin proteins, and in an Ising lattice gas. We discuss the mechanisms responsible for rapid and efficient assembly in these systems, and we use measurements…
Muscles consume metabolic energy (ATP) to produce force. A mathematical model for energy expenditure can be useful in estimating real-time costs of movements or to predict energy optimal movements. Metabolic cost models developed so far…
Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…
Protein assembly plays an important role in the regulation of biological systems. The cytoskeleton assembly activity is provided by the binding cofactors GTP (guanidine triphosphate) or ATP(adenosine triphosphate) to monomeric protein, and…
Cytoskeletal gels are prototyped to reproduce the mechanical contraction of the cytoskeleton in-vitro. They are composed of a polymer network (backbone), swollen by the presence of a liquid solvent, and active molecules (molecular motors,…
Flows over remarkably long distances are crucial to the functioning of many organisms, across all kingdoms of life. Coordinated flows are fundamental to power deformations, required for migration or development, or to spread resources and…
Cytoskeletal filaments are capable of self-assembly in the absence of externally supplied chemical energy, but the rapid turnover rates essential for their biological function require a constant flux of ATP or GTP hydrolysis. The same is…
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…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…
Calcium activation of striated muscle is known to exhibit a strongly cooperative dependency on calcium. Because the calcium receptor protein, troponin (Tn) is known to bind calcium non-cooperatively and has yet to be linked to a cooperative…
We provide a prototypical description of mechanically-induced collective conformational change (folding), relevant in a variety of biological contexts from muscle contraction to hair cell gating and integrin binding. Our study is inspired…
With the formal construction of a thermodynamic spring, I describe the mechanics, energetics, entropy, and kinetics of a binary mechanical model system. A protein that transitions between two metastable structural states behaves as a…
Assembly and stability of mitotic spindle is governed by the interplay of various intra-cellular forces, e.g. the forces generated by motor proteins by sliding overlapping anti-parallel microtubules (MTs) polymerized from the opposite…
Actin growth is a fundamental biophysical process and it is, at the same time, a prototypical example of diffusion-mediated surface growth. We formulate a coupled chemo-mechanical, one-dimensional growth model encompassing both material…
We investigate the isometric transient response of muscle using a quantitative stochastic model of the actomyosin cycle based on the swinging lever-arm hypothesis. We first consider a single pair of filaments, and show that when values of…
In this paper we study aggregation kinetics in systems of particles functionalised by complementary linkers. Most of the coarse-grained models currently employed to study large-scale self-assembly of these systems rely on effective…
We propose a two-dimensional model for a complete description of the dynamics of molecular motors, including both the processive movement along track filaments and the dissociation from the filaments. The theoretical results on the…
Voluntary human motion is the product of muscle activity that results from upstream motion planning of the motor cortical areas. We show that muscle activity can be artificially generated based on motion features such as position, velocity,…