Related papers: Examining the assembly pathways and active microtu…
A phenomenological description for active bundles of polar filaments is presented. The activity of the bundle results from crosslinks, that induce relative displacements between the aligned filaments. Our generic description is based on…
The reproduction of a living cell requires a repeatable set of chemical events to be properly coordinated. Such events define a replication cycle, coupling the growth and shape change of the cell membrane with internal metabolic reactions.…
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…
Self-assembly dynamics in binary surfactant mixtures and structure changes of lipid vesicles induced by detergent solution are studied using coarse-grained molecular simulations. Disk-shaped micelles, the bicelles, are stabilized by…
The distributions of many proteins in rod-shaped bacteria are far from homogenous. Often they accumulate at the cell poles or in the cell center. At the same time, the copy number of proteins in a single cell is relatively small making the…
Circulating tumor cell clusters play an important role in the metastatic cascade. These clusters can acquire a migratory and more invasive phenotype, and coordinate their motion to migrate as a collective. Before such clusters can form by…
In biological systems, molecular-scale forces and motions are pivotal for enabling processes like motility, shape change, and replication. These forces and motions are organized, amplified, and transmitted across macroscopic scales by…
Hypothesis: Colloidal molecules with anisotropic shapes and interactions are powerful model systems for deciphering the behavior of real molecules and building units for creating materials with designed properties. While many strategies for…
This paper presents an overview and discussion of magnetocapillary self-assemblies. New results are presented, in particular concerning the possible development of future applications. These self-organizing structures possess the notable…
The temperature profiles of magnetically confined plasmas can display distinctive longlived pedestals at the edge and internally. Here we show that such structures can arise naturally through avalanching transport in a sandpile model. A…
We report Monte-Carlo simulation studies of some systems consisting of polar rod-like molecules interacting via a pair potential that exhibit liquid crystal phases, attributed with tilt angles of large magnitude. For theoretical…
We develop a microscopic biophysical model for self-organization and reshaping of artificial tissue, that is co-driven by microscopic active forces between cells and extracellular matrix (ECM), and macroscopic forces that develop within the…
Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…
Microtubules are biological protein polymers with critical and diverse functions. Their structures share some similarities with photosynthetic antenna complexes, particularly in the ordered arrangement of photoactive molecules with large…
Microtubules are hollow cylindrical polymers composed of the highly negatively-charged (~23e), high dipole moment (1750 D) protein a,b-tubulin. While the roles of microtubules in chromosomal segregation, macromolecular transport and cell…
Many cells contain non-centrosomal arrays of microtubules (MT), but the assembly, organisation and function of these arrays are poorly understood. We present the first theoretical model for the non-centrosomal MT cytoskeleton in…
The availability of protein is an important factor for the determination of the size of the mitotic spindle. Involved in spindle-size regulation is kinesin-8, a molecular motor and microtubule (MT) depolymerase, which is known to tightly…
Adiabatic invariants foliate phase space, and impart a macro-scale hierarchy by separating microscopic variables. On a macroscopic leaf, long-scale ordered structures are created while maximizing entropy. A plasma confined in a…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
Plant morphology emerges from cellular growth and structure. The turgor-driven diffuse growth of a cell can be highly anisotropic: significant longitudinally and negligible radially. Such anisotropy is ensured by cellulose microfibrils…