Related papers: Physics of muscle contraction
The actin cytoskeleton of adherent tissue cells often condenses into filament bundles contracted by myosin motors, so-called stress fibers, which play a crucial role in the mechanical interaction of cells with their environment. Stress…
Actin is a key component of the cytoskeleton, which plays central roles in cell motility, division, growth, and tensile strength. To enable this wide range of transient mechanical processes and properties, networks of actin filaments…
While the power stroke of myosin and the release of inorganic phosphate (Pi) play crucial roles in transforming ATP's chemical energy into mechanical work across diverse biological systems, the exact temporal relationship between these…
Stretching of a protein by a fluid flow is compared to that in a force-clamp apparatus. The comparison is made within a simple topology-based dynamical model of a protein in which the effects of the flow are implemented using Langevin…
Mechanical forces generated by myosin II molecular motors drive diverse cellular processes, most notably shape change, division and locomotion. These forces may be transmitted over long range through the cytoskeletal medium - a disordered,…
Monte Carlo simulations of a simple lattice model of protein folding show two distinct regimes depending on the chain length. The first regime well describes the folding of small protein sequences and its kinetic counterpart appears to be…
Dynamic facilitation theory assumes short-ranged dynamic constraints to be the essential feature of supercooled liquids and draws much of its conclusions from the study of kinetically constrained models. While deceptively simple, these…
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
We discuss the force-velocity relations obtained in a two-state crossbridge model for molecular motors. They can be calculated analytically in two limiting cases: for a large number and for one pair of motors. The effect of the…
Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…
The theory describing action of medicines explored in this paper is based on assumption that vital activity of the cell may be described in terms of the model of two states: resting state and excitation. According to available physiological…
To develop a minimal model for a cell moving in a crowded environment such as in tissue, we investigate the response of a liquid drop of active matter moving on a flat rigid substrate to forces applied at its boundaries. We consider two…
Passive dynamic walking is a useful model for investigating the mechanical functions of the body that produce energy-efficient walking. The basin of attraction is very small and thin, and it has a fractal-like shape; this explains the…
We relate the breakdown of equations of states for the mechanical pressure of generic dry active systems to the lack of momentum conservation in such systems. We show how sources and sinks of momentum arise generically close to confining…
Mechanochemical coupling was studied for two different types of myosin motors in cells: myosin V, which carries cargo over long distances by as a single molecule; and myosin II, which generates a contracting force in cooperation with other…
The shoulder joint is one of the functionally and anatomically most sophisticated articular systems in the human body. Both complex movement patterns and the stabilization of the highly mobile joint rely on intricate three-dimensional…
The collective dynamics of $N$ weakly coupled processive molecular motors are considered theoretically. We show, using a discrete lattice model, that the velocity-force curves strongly depend on the effective dynamic interactions between…
Cells in an epithelial monolayer coordinate motion with their neighbors giving rise to collectively moving packs of sizes spanning multiple cell diameters. The physical mechanism controlling the pack size, however, remains unclear. A…
Cell motility and tissue morphogenesis depend crucially on the dynamic remodelling of actomyosin networks. An actomyosin network consists of an actin polymer network connected by crosslinker proteins and motor protein myosins that generate…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…