Related papers: Biopolymers: life's mechanical scaffolds
A feature of current membrane systems is the fact that objects and membranes are persistent. However, this is not true in the real world. In fact, cells and intracellular proteins have a well-defined lifetime. Inspired from these biological…
In these Lecture Notes we aim at clarifying how soft matter physics, and herein notably statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics, can be engaged to understand and manipulate non-equilibrium systems consisting of numerous (microscopic)…
The twisting and writhing of a cell body and associated mechanical stresses is an underappreciated constraint on microbial self-propulsion. Multi-flagellated bacteria can even buckle and writhe under their own activity as they swim through…
We measure different contributions to entropy production in a living functional epithelial tissue. We do this by extracting the functional dynamics of development while at the same time quantifying fluctuations. Using the translucent…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
Biological organisms often have elongated, flexible structures with some degree of chirality in their bodies or movements. In nature, these organisms frequently take advantage of self-encapsulation mechanisms that create folded…
A contemporary procedure to grow artificial tissue is to seed cells onto a porous biomaterial scaffold and culture it within a perfusion bioreactor to facilitate the transport of nutrients to growing cells. Typical models of cell growth for…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…
A long standing puzzle in the rheology of living cells is the origin of the experimentally observed long time stress relaxation. The mechanics of the cell is largely dictated by the cytoskeleton, which is a biopolymer network consisting of…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Cells are known to sense and respond to their mechanical microenvironment in profound ways. Various evidence has implicated the adhesome, a body of adhesion associated proteins, in several cell fate decisions, including differentiation and…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
Under many physiological and pathological conditions such as division and migration, cells undergo dramatic deformations, under which their mechanical integrity is supported by cytoskeletal networks (i.e. intermediate filaments, F-actin,…
Proteins are the common constituents of all living cells. They are molecular machines that interact with each other as well as with other cell products and carry out a dizzying array of functions with distinction. These interactions follow…
Cells actively probe and respond to the stiffness of their surroundings. Since mechanosensory cells in connective tissue are surrounded by a disordered network of biopolymers, their in vivo mechanical environment can be extremely…
Soft matter materials, such as polymers, membranes, proteins, are often electrically charged. This makes them water soluble, which is of great importance in technological application and a prerequisite for biological function. We discuss a…
Heteropolymers are ubiquitous in both synthetic systems, such as block copolymers, and biological macromolecules, including proteins and nucleic acids. Beyond their chemical composition, these polymers often exhibit spatial variations in…
We study the elasticity of fibrous materials composed of generalized stiff polymers. It is shown that in contrast to cellular foam-like structures affine strain fields are generically unstable. Instead, a subtle interplay between the…
Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…
Understanding dynamic and complex interaction of biological membranes with extracellular matrices plays a crucial role in controlling a variety of cell behavior and functions, from cell adhesion and growth to signaling and differentiation.…