Related papers: Cell motility as an energy minimization process
Microscopic biological systems operate far from equilibrium, are subject to strong fluctuations, and are composed of many coupled components with interactions varying in nature and strength. Researchers are actively investigating the…
Motivated by experimental results on the interplay between molecular motors and tau proteins, we extend lattice-based models of intracellular transport to include a second species of particle which locally influences the motor-filament…
Cell migration is a fundamental process for life and is highly dependent on the dynamical and mechanical properties of the cytoskeleton. Intensive physical and biochemical crosstalk between actin, microtubules, and intermediate filaments…
For various species of biological cells, experimental observations indicate the existence of universal distributions of the cellular size, scaling relations between the cell-size moments and simple rules for the cell-size control. We…
Motor proteins are active enzymatic molecules that drive a variety of biological processes, including transfer of genetic information, cellular transport, cell motility and muscles contraction. It is known that these biological molecular…
Within living cells, the transport of cargo is accomplished by groups of molecular motors. Such collective transport could utilize mechanisms which emerge from inter-motor interactions in ways that are yet to be fully understood. Here we…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
We show that when cells communicate by contact-mediated interactions, heterogeneity in cell shapes and sizes leads to qualitatively distinct collective behavior in the tissue. For inter-cellular coupling that implements lateral inhibition,…
Collective actuation in active solids - the spontaneous coherent excitation of a few vibrational modes - emerges from a feedback between structural deformations and the orientation of active forces. It is an excellent candidate as a basic…
Cells are able to generate phenotypic diversity both during development and in response to stressful and changing environments, aiding survival. The biologically and medically vital process of a cell assuming a functionally important fate…
We study the dynamics and phase behaviour of a dry suspension of microtubules and molecular motors. We obtain a set of continuum equations by rigorously coarse graining a microscopic model where motor-induced interactions lead to parallel…
Mathematical and computational models can assist in gaining an understanding of cell behavior at many levels of organization. Here, we review models in the literature that focus on eukaryotic cell motility at 3 size scales: intracellular…
Metabolic scaling is one of the most important patterns in biology. Theory explaining the 3/4-power size-scaling of biological metabolic rate does not predict the non-linear scaling observed for smaller life forms. Here we present a new…
We analyze the collective behavior of hydrodynamically coupled molecular motors. We show that the local fluxes induced by motors displacement can induce the experimentally observed bidirectional motion of cargoes and vesicles. By means of a…
We study the magnetization dynamics of a molecular magnet driven by static and variable magnetic fields within a semiclassical treatment. The underling analyzes is valid in a regime, when the energy is definitely lower than the anisotropy…
Simulations can help unravel the complicated ways in which molecular structure determines function. Here, we use molecular simulations to show how slight alterations of a molecular motor's structure can cause the motor's typical dynamical…
Systems with two species of active molecular motors moving on (cytoskeletal) filaments into opposite directions are studied theoretically using driven lattice gas models. The motors can unbind from and rebind to the filaments. Two motors…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. By adopting a simple theoretical framework for intra-cellular chemical reaction dynamics with…
We formulate an active-gel theory for multicellular migration in the extra-cellular matrix (ECM). The cells are modeled as an active, polar solvent, and the ECM as a viscoelastic solid. Our theory enables to analyze the dynamic reciprocity…
Cell movement, for example during embryogenesis or tumor metastasis, is a complex dynamical process resulting from an intricate interplay of multiple components of the cellular migration machinery. At first sight, the paths of migrating…