Related papers: Geometric effects induce anomalous size-dependent …

The functioning of machines typically requires a concerted action of their parts. This requirement also holds for molecular motors that drive vital cellular processes and imposes constraints on their conformational changes as well as the…

We discuss the plastic behavior of an amorphous matrix reinforced by hard particles. A mesoscopic depinning-like model accounting for Eshelby elastic interactions is implemented. Only the effect of a plastic disorder is considered.…

In vivo, eukaryotic cells are embedded in a matrix environment, where they grow and develop. Generally, this extracellular matrix (ECM) is an anisotropic fibrous structure, through which macromolecules and biochemical signaling molecules at…

Inspired by recent experimental observation of patterning at the membrane of a living cell, we propose a generic model for the dynamics of a fluctuating interface driven by particle-like inclusions which stimulate its growth. We find that…

Collective motion is a phenomenon observed across length scales in nature, from bacterial swarming and tissue migration to the flocking of animals. The mechanisms underlying this behavior vary significantly depending on the biological…

The diffusive transport of biased Brownian particles in a two-dimensional symmetric channel is investigated numerically considering both the no-flow and the reflection boundary conditions at the channel boundaries. Here, the geometrical…

Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…

Active motion of molecules along filamentous structures is a crucial feature of cell biology and is often modeled with the paradigmatic asymmetric simple exclusion process. Motivated by recent experimental studies that have addressed the…

We study growth limited by packing for irregular objects in two dimensions. We generate packings by seeding objects randomly in time and space and allowing each object to grow until it collides with another object. The objects we consider…

Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…

We study the nonlinear hopping transport in one-dimensional rings and open channels. Analytical results are derived for the stationary current response to a constant bias without assuming any specific coupling to the external fields. It is…

Assemblies of anisotropic particles commonly appear in studies of active many-body systems. However, in two dimensions, the geometric ramifications of the finite density of such objects are not entirely understood. To fully characterize…

We study a minimal model of a crawling eukaryotic cell with a chemical polarity controlled by a reaction-diffusion mechanism describing Rho GTPase dynamics. The size, shape, and speed of the cell emerge from the combination of the chemical…

In the growth of bacterial colonies, a great variety of complex patterns are observed in experiments, depending on external conditions and the bacterial species. Typically, existing models employ systems of reaction-diffusion equations or…

Suspensions of swimming bacteria interact hydrodynamically over long ranges, organizing themselves into collective states that drive large-scale chaotic flows, often referred to as "bacterial turbulence". Despite extensive experimental and…

Filopodia are ubiquitous fingerlike protrusions, spawned by many eukaryotic cells, to probe and interact with their environments. Polymerization dynamics of actin filaments, comprising the structural core of filopodia, largely determine…

We study the influence of structural obstacles in a disordered environment on the size and shape characteristics of long flexible polymer macromolecules. We use the model of self-avoiding random walks on diluted regular lattices at the…

Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…

Many active systems are capable of forming intriguing patterns at scales significantly larger than the size of their individual constituents. Cyanobacteria are one of the most ancient and important phyla of organisms that has allowed the…

Microbial colonies cultured on agar Petri dishes have become a model system to study biological evolution in populations expanding in space. Processes such as clonal segregation and gene surfing have been shown to be affected by…