Related papers: Excitable mechanics embodied in a walking cilium
How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm $C. elegans$, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with…
Limbless crawling is ubiquitous in biology, from cells to organisms. We develop and analyze a model for the dynamics of one-dimensional elastic crawlers, subject to active stress and deformation-dependent friction with the substrate. We…
Molecular motors perform active movements along cytoskeletal filaments and drive the traffic of organelles and other cargo particles in cells. In contrast to the macroscopic traffic of cars, however, the traffic of molecular motors is…
Animal cells form contractile structures to promote various functions, from cell motility to cell division. Force generation in these structures is often due to molecular motors such as myosin that require polar substrates for their…
How dynamic interactions between nervous system regions in mammals performs online motor control remains an unsolved problem. In this paper we show that feedback control is a simple, yet powerful way to understand the neural dynamics of…
We present a new kinetic equation for cell migration driven by mechanical interactions with the substrate, an effect not previously captured in kinetic models, and essential for explaining observed collective behaviors such as those in…
Cells move differently on substrates with different elasticities. In particular, the persistence time of their motion is higher on stiffer substrates. We show that this behavior will result in a net transport of cells directed up a…
We consider nonequilibrium transport in a simple chain of identical mechanical cells in which particles move around. In each cell, there is a rotating disc, with which these particles interact, and this is the only interaction in the model.…
A human is a thing that moves in space. Like all things that move in space, we can in principle use differential equations to describe their motion as a set of functions that maps time to position (and velocity, acceleration, and so on).…
Many cell types exhibit oscillatory activity, such as repetitive action potential firing due to the Hodgkin-Huxley dynamics of ion channels in the cell membrane or reveal intracellular inositol triphosphate (IP$_3$) mediated calcium…
During animal development and homeostasis, the structure of tissues, including muscles, blood vessels and connective tissues adapts to mechanical strains in the extracellular matrix (ECM). These strains originate from the differential…
To explain the differentiation of stem cells in terms of dynamical systems theory, models of interacting cells with intracellular protein expression dynamics are analyzed and simulated. Simulations were carried out for all possible protein…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
Empirical observations indicate striking similarities among locomotion in terrestrial animals, birds, and fish, but unifying physical grounds are lacking. When applied to efficient locomotion, the analytical mechanics principle of minimum…
From biofilm and colony formation in bacteria to wound healing and embryonic development in multicellular organisms, groups of living cells must often move collectively. While considerable study has probed the biophysical mechanisms of how…
Today's robotic quadruped systems can robustly walk over a diverse range of rough but continuous terrains, where the terrain elevation varies gradually. Locomotion on discontinuous terrains, such as those with gaps or obstacles, presents a…
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…
Recently individual two-headed kinesin molecules have been studied in in vitro motility assays revealing a number of their peculiar transport properties. In this paper we propose a simple and robust model for the kinesin stepping process…
We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework,…
We present a new model for the dynamics of the presynaptic intracellular calcium concentration in neurons evoked by various stimulation protocols. The aim of the model is twofold: We want to discuss the calcium transients during and after…