Related papers: Distribution of active forces in the cell cortex
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
Polymerization of dendritic actin networks underlies important mechanical processes in cell biology such as the protrusion of lamellipodia, propulsion of growth cones in dendrites of neurons, intracellular transport of organelles and…
Molecular dynamics approaches use wave packets as nucleon wave functions to simulate the time evolution of nuclear reactions. It is crucial to activate the momentum fluctuation inherent in each wave packet so that it properly affects the…
We examine the network of forces to be expected in a static assembly of hard, frictionless spherical beads of random sizes, such as a colloidal glass. Such an assembly is minimally connected: the ratio of constraint equations to contact…
The cytoskeletal component actomyosin is a canonical example of active matter since the powerstroke cycle locally converts chemical energy in the form of adenoside triphosphate (ATP) into mechanical work for remodelling. Observing myosin II…
The symmetry breaking of the actin network from radial to longitudinal symmetry has been identified as the major mechanism for keratocytes (fish cells) motility on solid substrate. For strong friction coefficient, the two dimensional actin…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
Mechanical coupling between a cell and substrate relies on focal adhesions, clusters of adhesion proteins linking stress fibers (bundles of actin proteins) inside the cell with surrounding tissue. Focal adhesions have been demonstrated to…
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…
Optical tracking in vivo experiments reveal that diffusion of particles in biological cells is strongly enhanced in the presence of ATP and the experimental data for animal cells could previously be reproduced within a phenomenological…
We formulate and characterize a model to describe the dynamics of semiflexible polymers in the presence of activity due to motor proteins attached irreversibly to a substrate, and a transverse pulling force acting on one end of the…
The traction on the surface of a spherical active colloid in a thermally fluctuating Stokesian fluid contains passive, active, and Brownian contributions. Here we derive these three parts systematically, by "projecting out" the fluid using…
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…
The movement of motor particles consisting of one or several molecular motors bound to a cargo particle is studied theoretically. The particles move on patterns of immobilized filaments. Several patterns are described for which the motor…
The mechanical properties of the cell depend crucially on the tension of its cytoskeleton, a biopolymer network that is put under stress by active motor proteins. While the fibrous nature of the network is known to strongly affect the…
Polymerization of actin proteins into dynamic structures is essential to eukaryotic cell life. This has motivated a large body of in vitro experiments measuring polymerization kinetics of individual filaments. Here we model these kinetics,…
Contraction assay based on surface measurement have been widely used to evaluate cell contractility in 3D models. This method is straightforward and requires no specific equipment, but it does not provide quantitative data about contraction…
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,…
Recent experimental studies, both in vivo and in vitro, have revealed that membrane components that bind to the cortical actomyosin meshwork are driven by active fluctuations, whereas membrane components that do not bind to cortical actin…