Related papers: Evolving roles and dynamics for catch and slip bon…
Any macroscopic deformation of a filamentous bundle is necessarily accompanied by local sliding and/or stretching of the constituent filaments. Yet the nature of the sliding friction between two aligned filaments interacting through…
A number of strange results have been reported for the twist elasticity of a semiflexible filament, actin. In particular dynamic and static methods for determining the torsional twist modulus give very different results. I show here that…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
Supported lipid membranes are useful and important model systems for studying cell membrane properties and membrane mediated processes. One attractive application of supported membranes is the design of phantom cells exhibiting well defined…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Catch bonds are interactions whose lifetimes increase under mechanical load, a counterintuitive behaviour that underlies diverse biological processes. Translating this mechanism to synthetic materials offers the potential to create systems…
Lubrication forces depend to a high degree on elasticity, texture, charge, chemistry, and temperature of the interacting surfaces. Therefore, by appropriately designing surface properties, we may tailor lubrication forces to reduce…
The microtubule network, an important part of the cytoskeleton, is constantly remodeled by alternating phases of growth and shrinkage of individual filaments. Plus-end tracking proteins (+TIPs) interact with the microtubule and in many…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
The predominant structural protein in vertebrates is collagen, which plays a key role in extracellular matrix and connective tissue mechanics. Despite its prevalence and physical importance in biology, the mechanical properties of molecular…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
Spatial segregation in the wall normal direction is investigated in suspensions containing a binary mixture of Neo-Hookean capsules subjected to pressure driven flow in a planar slit. The two components of the binary mixture have unequal…
Softer means stickier for solid adhesives, because material compliance facilitates close contact between non-conformal surfaces. Recent discoveries have revealed that soft materials can exhibit a rich array of new physics arising from…
Biological cells embedded in fibrous matrices have been observed to form inter-cellular bands of dense and aligned fibers, through which they mechanically interact over long distances. Such matrix-mediated cellular interactions have been…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
We use Brownian dynamics simulations to study the formation of chromatin loops through diffusive sliding of slip-link-like proteins, mimicking the behaviour of cohesin molecules. We recently proposed that diffusive sliding is sufficient to…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
The transition from static to dynamic friction when an elastic body is slid over another is now known to result from the motion of interface rupture fronts. These fronts may be either crack-like or pulse-like, with the latter involving…
Cellular migration is crucial for biological processes including embryonic development, immune response, and wound healing. The myosin-clutch model is a framework that describes how cells control migration through the interactions between…
Many cellular processes are tightly connected to the dynamics of microtubules (MTs). While in neuronal axons MTs mainly regulate intracellular trafficking, they participate in cytoskeleton reorganization in many other eukaryotic cells,…