Related papers: Elasticity-associated rebinding rate of molecular …
Single receptor-ligand bonds have finite lifetimes, so that biological systems can dynamically react to changes in their environment. In cell adhesion, adhesion bonds usually act cooperatively in adhesion clusters. Outside the cellular…
Rebinding kinetics of molecular ligands plays a critical role in biomachinery, from regulatory networks to protein transcription, and is also a key factor for designing drugs and high-precision biosensors.In this study, we investigate…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Cell membranes interact via anchored receptor and ligand molecules. Central questions on cell adhesion concern the binding affinity of these membrane-anchored molecules, the mechanisms leading to the receptor-ligand domains observed during…
We study the mechanics of a reversible decohesion (unzipping) of an elastic layer subjected to quasi-static end-point loading. At the micro level the system is simulated by an elastic chain of particles interacting with a rigid foundation…
Softer means stickier for solid adhesives, because material compliance facilitates close contact between non-conformal surfaces. Recent discoveries have revealed that soft materials can exhibit a rich array of new physics arising from…
Cell-cell adhesion is one the most fundamental mechanisms regulating collective cell migration during tissue development, homeostasis and repair, allowing cell populations to self-organize and eventually form and maintain complex tissue…
We solve the stochastic equations for a cluster of parallel bonds with shared constant loading, rebinding and the completely dissociated state as an absorbing boundary. In the small force regime, cluster lifetime grows only logarithmically…
In Part I of this two part series, we presented a multi-neighbor dependent contact model for adhesive elastic-plastic particles built upon the method of dimensionality reduction that is valid for the elastic and fully-plastic contact…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
The adhesion of biological membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. Central questions are how the binding kinetics of these proteins is affected by the membranes and by the membrane anchoring…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
We analyze the effect of an external electric field on the electronic structure of molecules which have been recently studied as molecular wires or diodes. We use a self-consistent tight binding technique which provides results in good…
Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…
The adhesive contact between elastic solids with randomly rough, self affine fractal surfaces is studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The interfacial binding energy obtained from the simulations of nominally flat and curved…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
The adhesion of cell membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. In this article, we review recent results from simulations and theory that lead to novel insights on how the binding equilibrium…
The adhesion of cells is mediated by receptors and ligands anchored in apposing membranes. A central question is how to characterize the binding affinity of these membrane-anchored molecules. For soluble molecules, the binding affinity is…
We illuminate the many-body effects underlying the structure, formation, and dissolution of cellular adhesion domains in the presence and absence of forces. We consider mixed Glauber-Kawasaki dynamics of a two-dimensional model of…