Related papers: Filament-motor protein system under loading: insta…
A perturbation framework is developed to analyze metastable behavior in stochastic processes with random internal and external states. The process is assumed to be under weak noise conditions, and the case where the deterministic limit is…
Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…
Assembly and stability of mitotic spindle is governed by the interplay of various intra-cellular forces, e.g. the forces generated by motor proteins by sliding overlapping anti-parallel microtubules (MTs) polymerized from the opposite…
Theoretical studies of stretching proteins with slipknots reveal a surprising growth of their unfolding times when the stretching force crosses an intermediate threshold. This behavior arises as a consequence of the existence of alternative…
We study a disordered network of bistable bonds subjected to periodic strain. The model is inspired by experiments on crumpled sheets and it features behaviors associated with glasses, including a complex energy landscape, memories, and…
The biological function of protein assemblies was conventionally equated with a unique three-dimensional protein structure and protein-specific interactions. However, in the past 20 years it was found that some assemblies contain long…
Motor proteins are active enzyme molecules that play a crucial role in many biological processes. They transform the chemical energy into the mechanical work and move unidirectionally along rigid cytoskeleton filaments. Single-molecule…
This paper presents the work devoted to the study of the operation of a miniaturized membrane Stirling engine. Indeed, such an engine relies on the dynamic coupling of the motion of two membranes to achieve a prime mover Stirling…
We present a general theoretical analysis of semiflexible filaments subject to viscous drag or point forcing. These are the relevant forces in dynamic experiments designed to measure biopolymer bending moduli. By analogy with the ``Stokes…
We study the enzymatic degradation of an elastic fiber under tension using an an isotropic random-walk model, coupled with binding-unbinding reactions that weaken the fiber. The fiber is represented by a chain of elastic springs in series,…
The movement of motor particles consisting of one or several molecular motors bound to a cargo particle is studied theoretically. The particles move on patterns of immobilized filaments. Several patterns are described for which the motor…
Eukaryotic flagella are active structures with a complex architecture of microtubules, motor proteins and elastic links. They are capable of whiplike motions driven by motors sliding along filaments that are themselves constrained at an…
The filamentation instability driven by two spatially uniform and counter-streaming beams of charged particles in plasmas is modelled by a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. Each beam consists of the electrons and positrons. The four…
We review the physical properties of macromolecular networks, consisting of semiflexible polymers such as actin. We start by giving a theoretical analysis of the conformational statistics and mechanical response of single filaments.…
In single-molecule experiments, the dynamics of molecular motors are often observed indirectly by measuring the trajectory of an attached bead in a motor-bead assay. In this work, we propose a method to extract the step size and stalling…
The mechanical properties of cells are dominated by the cytoskeleton, an interconnected network of long elastic filaments. The connections between the filaments are provided by crosslinking proteins, which constitute, next to the filaments,…
We use nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to verify recent tube-model predictions that associative polymer networks exhibit broad stretch fluctuations during elongational flow. Simulations further show that these fluctuating…
We investigate the growth of a branched actin network under load. Using a combination of simulations and theory, we show that the network adapts to the load and exhibits two regimes: a finite velocity at low stress, followed by a power-law…
We present a generic theory for the dynamics of a stiff filament under tension, in an active medium with orientational correlations, such as a microtubule in contractile actin. In sharp contrast to the case of a passive medium, we find the…
A magnetic-mechanical oscillating system consists of two identical leaf springs, a non-magnetic base, and some magnets. The leaf springs are fixed at the bottom to the non-magnetic base, while the magnet is attached to the top of the leaf…