Related papers: Enhanced diffusion and chemotaxis at the nanoscale

Numerous cell-types have shown a remarkable ability to detect and move along gradients in stiffness of an underlying substrate -- a process known as durotaxis. The mechanisms underlying durotaxis are still unresolved, but generally believed…

Many transport processes in nature take place on substrates, often considered as unidimensional lanes. These unidimensional substrates are typically non-static: affected by a fluctuating environment, they can undergo conformational changes.…

The different mechanisms involved in the alloying of epitaxial nanocrystals are reported in this letter. Intermixing during growth, surface diffusion and intra-island diffusion were investigated by varying the growth conditions and…

Chemotaxis is typically modeled in the context of cellular motion towards a static, exogenous source of chemoattractant. Here, we propose a time-dependent mechanism of chemotaxis in which a self-propelled particle ({\it e.g.}, a cell)…

Surfactant transport is central to a diverse range of natural phenomena, and for many practical applications in physics and engineering. Surprisingly, this process remains relatively poorly understood at the molecular scale. This study…

The diffusion of enzymes is of fundamental importance for many biochemical processes. Enhanced or directed enzyme diffusion can alter the accessibility of substrates and the organization of enzymes within cells. Several studies based on…

A liquid volume containing dissolved solutes moves through a charged nanofluidic channel under the influence of the concentration gradient of the solutes, non-trivially modulated by the electrostatic interaction between ionic liquid and…

Mixed-substrate microbial growth is among the most intensely studied systems in molecular microbiology. Several mathematical models have been developed to account for the genetic regulation of such systems, especially those resulting in…

Epithelial cell clusters often move collectively on a substrate. Mechanical signals play a major role in organizing this behavior. There are a number of experimental observations in these systems which await a comprehensive explanation.…

We examine the budding of a nanoscale particle through a lipid bilayer using molecular dynamics simulations, free energy calculations, and an elastic theory, with the aim of determining the extent to which equilibrium elasticity theory can…

Conformational changes are observed in many enzymes, but their role in catalysis is highly controversial. Here we present a theoretical model that illustrates how rigid catalysts can be fundamentally limited and how a conformational change…

Using kinetic Monte-Carlo simulations of a Solid-on-Solid model we investigate the influence of step edge diffusion (SED) and evaporation on Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). Based on these investigations we propose two strategies to optimize…

In eukaryotic cell chemotaxis, cells extend and retract transient actin-driven protrusions at their membrane that facilitate both the detection of external chemical gradients and directional movement via the formation of focal adhesions…

Sub-diffusion in biological systems is conventionally treated as anomalous, requiring fractional derivatives, heavy-tailed waiting times, or fitted memory kernels. We argue that this anomaly is an artifact of an incomplete phase space.…

Cells can use periodic enzyme activities to adapt to periodic environments or existing internal rhythms and to establish metabolic cycles that schedule biochemical processes in time. A periodically changing allocation of the protein budget…

Chemotaxis is the physical phenomenon that bacteria adjust their motions according to chemical stimulus. A classical model for this phenomenon is a kinetic equation that describes the velocity jump process whose tumbling/transition kernel…

The high accuracy exhibited by biological information transcription processes is due to kinetic proofreading, i.e., by a mechanism which reduces the error rate of the information-handling process by driving it out of equilibrium. We provide…

Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…

We study the diffusion and submonolayer spreading of chainlike molecules on surfaces. Using the fluctuating bond model we extract the collective and tracer diffusion coefficients D_c and D_t with a variety of methods. We show that…

In this chapter, I will enter into the roots of entropically-driven transport with a focus on diffusio-osmotic transport in nanochannels. Diffusio-osmosis is a subtle surface transport, originating in entropic driving forces occuring within…