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How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
We study the effect of turnover of cross linkers, motors and filaments on the generation of a contractile stress in a network of filaments connected by passive crosslinkers and subjected to the forces exerted by molecular motors. We perform…
We introduce a mathematical model for the mechanical behaviour of the eukaryotic cell cytoskeleton. This discrete model involves a regular array of pre-stressed protein filaments that exhibit resistance to enthalpic stretching, joined at…
Current understanding of how contractility emerges in disordered actomyosin networks of non-muscle cells is still largely based on the intuition derived from earlier works on muscle contractility. This view, however, largely overlooks the…
In the mitotic spindle microtubules attach to kinetochores via catch bonds during metaphase, and microtubule depolymerization forces give rise to stochastic chromosome oscillations. We investigate the cooperative stochastic microtubule…
The cytoskeleton is an important subsystem of cells that is involved for example in cell division and locomotion. It consists of filaments that are cross-linked by molecular motors that can induce relative sliding between filaments and…
Sliding ferroelectrics built from stacked nonpolar monolayers enable out-of-plane polarization and unconventional switching via interlayer sliding, yet the microscopic sliding dynamics remain unclear. Using machine-learning molecular…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells has many types of crosslinkers. The mechanical interplay between these different crosslinker types is an open issue in cytoskeletal mechanics. We develop a framework to study the cooperativity and…
While most chemical bonds weaken under the action of mechanical force (called slip bond behavior), nature has developed bonds that do the opposite: their lifetime increases as force is applied. While such catch bonds have been studied quite…
Protein dynamics is a fundamental element to comprehend their biological functions. However, a theoretical picture providing microscopic-detail explanation of its relevant features is still missing. One of the outmost relevant properties…
Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…
Microtubules, the primary components of the chromosome segregation machinery, are stabilized by longitudinal and lateral non-covalent bonds between the tubulin subunits. However, the thermodynamics of these bonds and the microtubule…
Subdiffusion is a hallmark of complex systems, ranging from protein folding to transport in viscoelastic media. However, despite its pervasiveness, the mechanistic origins of subdiffusion remain contested. Here, we analyze both Markovian…
During cell division, the mitotic spindle moves dynamically through the cell to position the chromosomes and determine the ultimate spatial position of the two daughter cells. These movements have been attributed to the action of cortical…
In active matter systems, self-propelled particles can self-organize to undergo collective motion, leading to persistent dynamical behavior out of equilibrium. In cells, cytoskeletal filaments and motor proteins self-organize into complex…
It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular motors…
In this paper, we develop and analyze a minimal model for a 2D network of cross-linked actin filaments and myosin motors, representing the cortical cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. We implement coarse-grained representations of force…
Microtubules are highly regulated dynamic elements of the cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. One of the regulation mechanisms observed in living cells is the severing by the proteins katanin and spastin. We introduce a model for the dynamics…