Related papers: Active transport in complex environments
Living systems are made of active materials with microscopic components that work together to perform macroscopic biological tasks. The breakdown of these collective functionalities leads to diseases, which, conversely, could be treated by…
Bioconvection, a phenomenon arising from the collective motion of motile microorganisms, plays a crucial role in shaping microbial distributions, fluid dynamics, and bloom formation in aquatic environments. While extensive research has…
Curvature plays a central role in the proper function of many biological processes. With active matter being a standard framework for understanding many aspects of the physics of life, it is natural to ask what effect curvature has on the…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
One common feature of a vehicle, an ant and a kinesin motor is that they all convert chemical energy, derived from fuel or food, into mechanical energy required for their forward movement; such objects have been modelled in recent years as…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into mechanical work to produce autonomous motion, and exhibit striking collective dynamics that biology relies on for essential functions. Controlling those dynamics and transport in…
In intracellular transports, motor proteins transport macromolecules as cargos to desired locations by moving on biopolymers such as microtubules. Recent experiments suggest that cargos that can associate motor proteins during their…
Collective motion of self-propelled organisms or synthetic particles often termed active fluid has attracted enormous attention in broad scientific community because of it fundamentally non-equilibrium nature. Energy input and interactions…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
Cells control fluid flows with a spatial and temporal precision that far exceeds the capabilities of current microfluidic technologies. Cells achieve this superior spatio-temporal control by harnessing dynamic networks of cytoskeleton and…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Swimmers and self-propelled particles are physical models for the collective behaviour and motility of a wide variety of living systems, such as bacteria colonies, bird flocks and fish schools. Such artificial active materials are amenable…
Cells move by run and tumble, a kind of dynamics in which the cell alternates runs over straight lines and re-orientations. This erratic motion may be influenced by external factors, like chemicals, nutrients, the extra-cellular matrix, in…
Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…
Active motion of molecules along filamentous structures is a crucial feature of cell biology and is often modeled with the paradigmatic asymmetric simple exclusion process. Motivated by recent experimental studies that have addressed the…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
Bacteria commonly live in structured communities that affect human health and influence ecological systems. Heterogeneous populations, such as motile and non-motile populations, often coexist in bacteria communities. Motile subpopulations…
The origins of the large differences observed to the rates with which the diverse particles are conveyed along axonal microtubules are still a matter of debate in the literature. There is evidence that certain neurodegenerative diseases may…