Related papers: Fluctuations of a membrane nanotube covered with a…
Myosin motor proteins drive vigorous steady-state fluctuations in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. Endogenous embedded semiflexible filaments such as microtubules, or added filaments such as single-walled carbon nanotubes are used as novel…
Many lipid membrane-mediated transport processes--such as mechanically-gated channel activation and solute transport--involve structural and dynamical features on membrane thickness length scales. Most existing membrane models, however,…
We analyze the non-equilibrium shape fluctuations of giant unilamellar vesicles encapsulating motile bacteria. Owing to bacteria--membrane collisions, we experimentally observe a significant increase in the magnitude of membrane…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…
We investigate the effect of thermal fluctuations on the mechanical properties of nanotubes by employing tools from statistical physics. For 2D sheets it was previously shown that thermal fluctuations effectively renormalize elastic moduli…
Active contributions to fluctuations are a direct consequence of metabolic energy consumption in living cells. Such metabolic processes continuously create active forces, which deform the membrane to control motility, proliferation as well…
Cell shape changes are largely controlled by the actin cytoskeleton, a dynamic filament network beneath the plasma membrane. Several cell types can form extended free-standing protrusions not supported by an extracellular substrate or…
The growth of actin filament networks is a fundamental biological process that drives a variety of cellular and intracellular motions. During motility, eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens are propelled by actin networks organized…
Optical tweezers allow the measurement of fluctuations at the nano-scale, in particular fluctuations in the end-to-end distance in single molecules. Fluctuation spectra can yield valuable information, but they can easily be contaminated by…
We theoretically investigate the membrane fluctuations of red blood cells with focus laid on the role of the cytoskeleton, viewing the system as a membrane coupled to sparse spring network. This model is exactly solvable and enables us to…
A new nanoscale device for fluctuation-enhanced sensing is proposed.
Superconducting fluctuations in long and narrow strips made from ultrathin NbN films, have been investigated. For large bias currents close to the critical current fluctuations led to localized, temporary transitions into the normal…
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,…
The mammalian cell membrane is embedded with biomolecular condensates of protein and lipid clusters, which interact with an underlying viscoelastic cytoskeleton network to organize the cell surface and mechanically interact with the…
We calculate the fluctuation spectrum of the shape of a lipid vesicle or cell exposed to a nonthermal source of noise. In particular we take into account constraints on the membrane area and the volume of fluid that it encapsulates when…
We investigate the effect of stress fluctuations on the stochastic dynamics of an inclusion embedded in a viscous gel. We show that, in non-equilibrium systems, stress fluctuations give rise to an effective attraction towards the boundaries…
Two-dimensional crystalline membranes have recently been realized experimentally in such systems as graphene and molybdenum disulfide, sparking a resurgence in interest in their statistical properties. Thermal fluctuations can significantly…
Dynamics of double membrane films is investigated in the long-wavelength limit including the overdamped squeezing mode. We demonstrate that thermal fluctuations essentially modify the character of the mode due to its nonlinear coupling to…
We present a detailed analysis of the micropipet experiments recently reported in J-B. Manneville et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 4356--4359 (1999), including a derivation of the expected behaviour of the membrane tension as a function of the…
We report on the effect of intermolecular forces on the fluctuations of supported liquid films. Using an optically-induced thermal gradient, we form nanometer-thin films of wetting liquids on glass substrates, where van der Waals forces are…