Related papers: Active Segregation Dynamics in the Living Cell
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
Biomolecular condensates in cells are often rich in catalytically-active enzymes. This is particularly true in the case of the large enzymatic complexes known as metabolons, which contain different enzymes that participate in the same…
Perturbations of fluid media can give rise to non-equilibrium dynamics, which may in turn cause motion of immersed inclusions. We consider perturbations ("activations") that are local in space and time, of a fluid density which is…
Many cell membrane proteins that bind to actin form dynamic clusters driven by contractile flows generated by the actomyosin machinery at the cell cortex. Recent evidence suggests that a necessary condition for the generation of these…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…
The production of mechanical stresses in living organisms largely relies on localized, force-generating active units embedded in filamentous matrices. Numerical simulations of discrete fiber networks with fixed boundaries have shown that…
Systems containing active components are intrinsically out of equilibrium, while binary mixtures reach their equilibrium configuration when complete phase separation is achieved. Active particles are found to stabilise non-equilibrium…
Adhesion-independent migration is a prominent mode of cell motility in confined environments, yet the physical principles that guide such movement remain incompletely understood. We present a phase-field model for simulating the motility of…
We develop a model for a driven cell- or artificial membrane in an electrolyte. The system is kept far from equilibrium by the application of a DC electric field or by concentration gradients, which causes ions to flow through specific…
Motivated by the unique physical properties of {\em biological active matter}, e.g., cytoskeletal dynamics in eukaryotic cells, we set up {\em effective} two-dimensional (2d) coarse-grained hydrodynamic equations for the dynamics of thin…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
Recent experiments in various cell types have shown that two-dimensional tissues often display local nematic order, with evidence of extensile stresses manifest in the dynamics of topological defects. Using a mesoscopic model where tissue…
Theories of self-organized active fluid surfaces have emerged as an important class of minimal models for the shape dynamics of biological membranes, cells and tissues. However, due to their inherent geometric nonlinearities and the absence…
In development and homeostasis, multi-cellular systems exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity in their biochemical and mechanical properties. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how spatiotemporally heterogeneous forces affect the…
In contrast to equilibrium systems, inertia can profoundly impact the phase behavior of active systems. This has been made particularly evident in recent years, with motility-induced phase separation (MIPS) exhibiting several intriguing…
In this work, we study the dynamics of a single active Brownian particle, as well as the collective behavior of interacting active Brownian particles, in a fluctuating heterogeneous environment. We employ a variant of the diffusing…
We consider a phenomenological continuum model for an active nematic fluid and show a universal, model independent, instability which renders the homogeneous nematic state unstable to order fluctuations. Using numerical and analytic tools…
We introduce and study a model of active Brownian motion with multiplicative noise describing fluctuations in the self-propulsion or activity. We find that the standard picture of density accumulation in slow regions is qualitatively…