Related papers: Energetic constraints on filament mediated cell po…
Important cellular processes, such as cell motility and cell division, are coordinated by cell polarity, which is determined by the non-uniform distribution of certain proteins. Such protein patterns form via an interplay of protein…
In the cell, protein complexes form relying on specific interactions between their monomers. Excluded volume effects due to molecular crowding would lead to correlations between molecules even without specific interactions. What is the…
Biological functions in living cells are controlled by protein interaction and genetic networks. These molecular networks should be dynamically stable against various fluctuations which are inevitable in the living world. In this paper, we…
We introduce a mathematical model for the mechanical behaviour of the eukaryotic cell cytoskeleton. This discrete model involves a regular array of pre-stressed protein filaments that exhibit resistance to enthalpic stretching, joined at…
Many fundamental biological processes are dependent on cellular migration. Although the mechanical mechanisms of single-cell migration are relatively well understood, those underlying migration of multiple cells adhered to each other in a…
In active matter systems, self-propelled particles can self-organize to undergo collective motion, leading to persistent dynamical behavior out of equilibrium. In cells, cytoskeletal filaments and motor proteins self-organize into complex…
Cytoskeletal motors known as motor proteins are molecules that drive cellular transport along several parallel cytoskeletal filaments and support many biological processes. Experimental evidences suggest that they interact with the nearest…
In living cells, protein-rich condensates can wet the cell membrane and surfaces of membrane-bound organelles. Interestingly, many phase-separating proteins also bind to membranes leading to a molecular layer of bound molecules. Here we…
Reaction-diffusion systems have been widely used to study spatio-temporal phenomena in cell biology, such as cell polarization. Coupled bulk-surface models naturally include compartmentalization of cytosolic and membrane-bound polarity…
The collective behaviour of confluent cell sheets is strongly influenced both by polar forces, arising through cytoskeletal propulsion and by active inter-cellular forces, which are mediated by interactions across cell-cell junctions. We…
Myosin motor proteins drive vigorous steady-state fluctuations in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. Endogenous embedded semiflexible filaments such as microtubules, or added filaments such as single-walled carbon nanotubes are used as novel…
Biological cell suspensions are known to show dielectric dispersions due to the Maxwell-Wagner mechanism. Many examples are summarized in a number of papers by Schwan [7, 9, 10]. By the application of an appropriate analysis to the…
Exocytosis is a common transport mechanism via which cells transport out non-essential macro-molecules (cargo) into the extra cellular space. ESCRT-III proteins are known to help in this. They polymerize into a conical spring like structure…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
The formation of polarized signaling domains on cell membranes is a fundamental example of biological pattern formation. While such patterns resemble structures from equilibrium phase separation, they are intrinsically non-equilibrium,…
We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
The process of polarization determines the head and tail of single cells. A mechanism of this kind frequently precedes the subsequent cell locomotion and it determines the direction of motion. The process of polarization has frequently been…
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…
Motility initiation in crawling cells requires transformation of a symmetric state into a polarized state. In contrast, motility arrest is associated with re-symmetrization of the internal configuration of a cell. Experiments on keratocytes…