Related papers: The Range of Cooperativity Modulates Actin Binding…

Cells and tissues have the remarkable ability to actively generate the forces required to change their shape. This active mechanical behavior is largely mediated by the actin cytoskeleton, a crosslinked network of actin filaments that is…

At the molecular level, most biological processes entail protein associations which in turn rely on a small fraction of interfacial residues called hot spots. Here we show that hot spots share a unifying molecular attribute: they provide a…

As cells grow and divide under a given environment, they become crowded and resources are limited, as seen in bacterial biofilms and multicellular aggregates. These cells often show strong interactions through exchanging chemicals, as in…

Proteins congregate into complexes to perform fundamental cellular functions. Phenotypic outcomes, in health and disease, are often mechanistically driven by the remodeling of protein complexes by protein coding mutations or cellular…

Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…

By introducing the notion of a dynamic overlap concentration scale, we identify universal and previously unreported features of the mechanical properties of active colloids. These features are codified by recognizing that the characteristic…

Allostery plays a fundament role in most biological processes. However, little theory is available to describe it outside of two-state models. Here we use a statistical mechanical approach to show that the allosteric coupling between two…

The interaction between actin filaments and microtubules is crucial for many eukaryotic cellular processes, such as, among others, cell polarization, cell motility and cellular wound healing. The importance of this interaction has long been…

Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…

Alignment interactions in active matter are typically modeled as relaxational dynamics toward local consensus. In unbounded systems, this makes alignment effectively decoupled from local density and therefore unable to sustain self-confined…

We report analytical and numerical modelling of active elastic networks, motivated by experiments on crosslinked actin networks contracted by myosin motors. Within a broad range of parameters, the motor-driven collapse of active elastic…

Investigation of protein self-assembly processes is important for the understanding of the growth processes of functional proteins as well as disease-causing amyloids. Inside cells, intrinsic molecular fluctuations are so high that they…

An accurate and efficient characterization of the polyelectrolyte properties for cytoskeleton filaments are key to the molecular understanding of electrical signal propagation, bundle and network formation, as well as other relevant…

The chromosomal DNA of bacteria is folded into a compact body called the nucleoid, which is composed essentially of DNA (80%), RNA (10%), and a number of different proteins (10%). These nucleoid proteins act as regulators of gene expression…

Actin networks, acting as an engine pushing against an external load, are fundamentally important to cell motility. A measure of the effectiveness of an engine is the velocity the engine is able to produce at a given force, the…

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…

The extent of coupling between the folding of a protein and its binding to a substrate varies from protein to protein. Some proteins have highly structured native states in solution, while others are natively disordered and only fold fully…

The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously restructuring itself. Enzymatic motors that act on the…

Tangentially driven active polymers (TDAPs), model systems for motor-driven filaments, have been extensively studied in uniform activity fields. Here, we show that an activity gradient breaks fore-aft symmetry, generating net body forces…

In allosteric proteins, binding a ligand can affect function at a distant location, for example by changing the binding affinity of a substrate at the active site. The induced fit and population shift models, which differ by the assumed…