Related papers: Why exercise builds muscles: Titin mechanosensing …
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
Myosin II is the muscle molecular motor that works in two bipolar arrays in each thick filament of the striated (skeletal and cardiac) muscle, converting the chemical energy into steady force and shortening by cyclic ATP--driven…
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
Muscle forces and joint kinematics estimated with musculoskeletal (MSK) modeling techniques offer useful metrics describing movement quality. Model-based computational MSK models can interpret the dynamic interaction between the neural…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
Calcium activation of striated muscle is known to exhibit a strongly cooperative dependency on calcium. Because the calcium receptor protein, troponin (Tn) is known to bind calcium non-cooperatively and has yet to be linked to a cooperative…
Voluntary human motion is the product of muscle activity that results from upstream motion planning of the motor cortical areas. We show that muscle activity can be artificially generated based on motion features such as position, velocity,…
How do humans move? Advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have produced impressive results in capturing human motion using physics-based humanoid control. However, torque-controlled humanoids fail to model key aspects of human motor…
Living cells adapt and respond actively to the mechanical properties of their environment. In addition to biochemical mechanotransduction, evidence exists for a myosin-dependent, purely mechanical sensitivity to the stiffness of the…
Humans and other animals coactivate agonist and antagonist muscles in many motor actions. Increases in muscle coactivation are thought to leverage viscoelastic properties of skeletal muscles to provide resistance against limb motion.…
Convergence-extension in embryos is controlled by chemical and mechanical signalling. A key cellular process is the exchange of neighbours via T1 transitions. We propose and analyse a model with positive feedback between recruitment of…
The actin cortex is a thin layer of actin, myosin, and actin binding proteins that underlies the membrane of most animal cells. It is highly dynamic and can undergo remodelling on time-scales of tens of seconds thanks to protein turnover…
Despite significant fluctuation under thermal noise, biological machines in cells perform their tasks with exquisite precision. Using molecular simulation of a coarse-grained model and theoretical arguments we envisaged how kinesin, a…
Exploring the intricate dynamics between muscular and skeletal structures is pivotal for understanding human motion. This domain presents substantial challenges, primarily attributed to the intensive resources required for acquiring ground…
The actin cortex is an active biopolymer network underneath the plasma membrane at the periphery of mammalian cells. It is a major regulator of cell shape through the generation of active cortical tension. In addition, the cortex…
In Part I of this article we have developed a novel mechanobiological model of a Tissue Engineering process that accounts for the mechanisms through which an isotropic or anisotropic adherence condition regulates the active functions of the…
Cooperative action of molecular motors is essential for many cellular processes. One possible regulator of motor coordination is the elasticity-mediated crosstalk (EMC) coupling between myosin II motors whose origin is the tensile stress…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
Myosin II plays a pivotal role in muscle contraction by generating force through the cooperative action of multiple motors on actin filaments. In this study, we integrate the nonlinear elasticity of the neck linker in individual myosin II…
Purpose: From the myofibrils to the whole muscle scale, muscle micro-constituents exhibit passive and active mechanical properties, potentially coupled to electrical, chemical, and thermal properties. Experimental characterization of some…