Related papers: Microtubule-based actin transport and localization…
Harnessing nanoscale motor proteins to actively control material shape is a promising strategy in nanotechnology and material science. One notable system is the actomyosin network, composed of actin filaments and myosin motor proteins,…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
Intracellular pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes and Rickettsia rickettsii move within a host cell by polymerizing a comet-tail of actin fibers that ultimately pushes the cell forward. This dense network of cross-linked actin polymers…
Mixtures of active and passive particles are ubiquitous at the microscale. Many essential microbial processes involve interactions with dead or immotile cells or passive crowders. When passive objects are immersed in active baths, their…
Protein fibril accumulation at interfaces is an important step in many physiological processes and neurodegenerative diseases as well as in designing materials. Here we show, using $\beta$-lactoglobulin fibrils as a model, that semiflexible…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
The actin cytoskeleton is a semiflexible biopolymer network whose morphology is controlled by a wide range of biochemical and physical factors. Actin is known to undergo a phase transition from a single-filament state to a bundled state by…
Gradual disruption of the actin cytoskeleton induces a series of structural shape changes in cells leading to a transformation of cylindrical cell extensions into a periodic chain of "pearls". Quantitative measurements of the pearling…
The selective insertion of foreign materials, such as fluorescent markers or plasmids, into living cells has been a challenging problem in cell biology.However, it is often necessary that researchers insert such materials into cells for…
Transport of molecular motors along protein filaments in a half-closed geometry is a common feature of biologically relevant processes in cellular protrusions. Using a lattice gas model we study how the interplay between active and…
The motion of molecules across channels is critically important for understanding mechanisms of cellular processes. Here we investigate the mechanism of interactions in the molecular transport by analyzing exactly solvable discrete…
Filamentous actin, a species of dynamic protein polymers, is one of the main components of the cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. We formulate a class of models that predict the possibility of bistable steady states in populations of dynamic…
The intracellular environment is a dynamic space filled with various organelles moving in all directions. Included in this diverse group of organelles are vesicles, which are involved in transport of molecular cargo throughout the cell.…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
Active networks composed of biopolymers and motor proteins provide versatile biomimetic systems that have advanced active matter physics and deepened our understanding of cytoskeletal dynamics and self-organization under diverse stimuli. In…
Theory and experiment have established that F-actin filaments are strongly attached to the intracellular parasites (such as Listeria) they propel with ``comet tails''. We consider the implications of these observations for propulsion. By…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
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…
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…
An actin filament contacting myosin molecules as a functional unit of muscle contraction induces magnetic dipoles along the filament when ATP molecules to be hydrolyzed are available there. The induced magnetic dipoles are coherent over the…