Related papers: A design framework for actively crosslinked filame…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Biological systems achieve precise control over ambient fluids through the self-organization of active protein structures including flagella, cilia, and cytoskeletal networks. In active structures individual proteins consume chemical energy…
Cells and tissues exert forces and can actively change shape. This strikingly autonomous behavior is powered by the cytoskeleton, which includes an active gel of actin filaments, crosslinks, and myosin molecular motors. Although individual…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
The cytoskeleton, consisting of biopolymer filaments, molecular motors, and passive crosslinking proteins, provides the internal structure of cells that facilitate movement, growth, and cell division. Understanding the microscopic…
Active centres and hot spots of proteins have a paramount importance in enzyme action, protein complex formation and drug design. Recently a number of publications successfully applied the analysis of residue networks to predict active…
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…
Contractile biopolymer networks, such as the actomyosin meshwork of animal cells, are ubiquitous in living organisms. The active gel theory, which provides the thermodynamic framework for these materials, has been mostly used in conjunction…
The interplay between cytoskeletal architecture and the nonlinearity of the interactions due to bucklable filaments plays a key role in modulating the cell's mechanical stability and affecting its structural rearrangements. We study a model…
The principles underlying protein folding remains one of Nature's puzzles with important practical consequences for Life. An approach that has gathered momentum since the late 1990's, looks at protein hetero-polymers and their folding…
Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…
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…
This paper builds on a recently introduced dynamical networking framework, applying it to model motor-driven transport along cytoskeletal filament networks. Within this approach, the networking functional describes the periodic binding 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…
Active matter agents consume internal energy or extract energy from the environment for locomotion and force generation. Already rather generic models, such as ensembles of active Brownian particles, exhibit phenomena, which are absent at…
Reconstituted filamentous actin networks with myosin motor proteins form active gels, in which motor proteins generate forces that drive the network far from equilibrium. This motor activity can also strongly affect the network elasticity;…
Networks are convenient mathematical models to represent the structure of complex systems, from cells to societies. In the past decade, multilayer network science -- the branch of the field dealing with units interacting in multiple…
Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…
The semiflexible F-actin network of the cytoskeleton is cross-linked by a variety of proteins including filamin, which contain Ig-domains that unfold under applied tension. We examine a simple semiflexible network model cross-linked by such…
We predict the thermodynamic and structural behavior of solutions of long cross-linked filaments. We find that at the mean field level, the entropy of self-assembled junctions induces an effective attraction between the filaments that can…