Related papers: Active Segregation Dynamics in the Living Cell
Developing tissues often maintain mechanical coherence while continuously remodeling through cellular processes such as cell divisions and rearrangements. In this way, they are an example of amorphous solids. In passive amorphous solids,…
Phase separation, the spontaneous segregation of density, is a ubiquitous phenomenon observed across diverse physical and biological systems. Within a crowd of motile elements, active phase separation emerges from the interplay of activity…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
Phase separation drives the formation of biomolecular condensates in cells, which comprise many components and sometimes possess multiple phases. The equilibrium physics of phase separation is well understood, but many components in…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…
Equilibrium self-assembly and conventional materials processing techniques fall far short of mimicking dynamic self-actuating processes that are commonplace throughout biology. To bridge the gap between living and synthetic matter, we study…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…
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…
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
We perform an analytical investigation of the cell interface dynamics in the framework of a minimal phase field model of cell motility suggested in [1], which consists of two coupled evolution equations for the order parameter and a…
We use a continuum, two-fluid approach to study a mixture of two active nematic fluids. Even in the absence of thermodynamically-driven ordering, for mixtures of different activities we observe turbulent microphase separation, where domains…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
Living cells move thanks to assemblies of actin filaments and myosin motors that range from very organized striated muscle tissue to disordered intracellular bundles. The mechanisms powering these disordered structures are debated, and all…
We consider a partial differential equation model for the growth of heterogeneous cell populations subdivided into multiple distinct discrete phenotypes. In this model, cells preferentially move towards regions where they feel less…
The nature of emergent collective behaviors of moving physical agents interacting with their neighborhood is a long-standing open issue in physical and biological systems alike. This calls for studies on the control of synchronization and…
We study the time-dependent height fluctuations of an active membrane containing energy-dissipating pumps that drive the membrane out of equilibrium. Unlike previous investigations based on models that neglect either curvature couplings or…
Cell shape changes are largely controlled by the actin cytoskeleton, a dynamic filament network beneath the plasma membrane. Several cell types can form extended free-standing protrusions not supported by an extracellular substrate or…
We present a fluctuating hydrodynamic description of an active lattice gas model with excluded volume interactions that exhibits motility-induced phase separation under appropriate conditions. For quasi-one dimension and higher, stability…
The mechanics of cells is strongly affected by molecular motors that generate forces in the cellular cytoskeleton. We develop a model for cytoskeletal networks driven out of equilibrium by molecular motors exerting transient contractile…
We report numerical results for the hydrodynamics of inhomogeneous lyotropic and extensile active nematic gels. By simulating the coupled Cahn-Hilliard, Navier-Stokes, and Beris-Edwards equation for the evolution of the composition, flow…