Related papers: Molecular motors enhance microtubule lattice plast…
Microtubules and motor proteins are building blocks of self-organized subcellular biological structures such as the mitotic spindle and the centrosomal microtubule array. These same ingredients can form new "bioactive" liquid-crystalline…
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…
It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular motors…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
Biomolecular motors use free energy to drive a variety of cellular tasks, including the transport of cargo, such as vesicles and organelles. We find that the widely-used `constant-force' approximation for the effect of cargo on motor…
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…
Dynamic instability in the cytoskeleton underlies a great many vital cellular processes. In neurons, it is thought to play a role in information processing and the establishment of synaptic connections. It is from this interneuronal…
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…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
Incorporating cells within active biomaterial scaffolds is a promising strategy to develop forefront materials that can autonomously sense, respond, and alter the scaffold in response to environmental cues or internal cell circuitry. Using…
We present a generic model of cell motility generated by acto-myosin contraction of the cell cortex. We identify analytically dynamical instabilities of the cortex and show that they trigger spontaneous cortical flows which in turn can…
The bacterial flagellar motor drives the rotation of flagellar filaments and enables many species of bacteria to swim. Torque is generated by interaction of stator units, anchored to the peptidoglycan cell wall, with the rotor. Recent…
Microtubules, major elements of the cell skeleton are, most of the time, well organized in vivo, but they can also show self-organizing behaviors in time and/or space in purified solutions in vitro. Theoretical studies and models based on…
Inside cells, various cargos are transported by teams of molecular motors. Intriguingly, the motors involved generally have opposite pulling directions, and the resulting cargo dynamics is a biased stochastic motion. It is an open question…
We study the effect of a coupling between two motor domains in highly-processive motor protein complexes. A simple stochastic discrete model, in which the two parts of the protein molecule interact through some energy potential, is…
We study the influence of filament elasticity on the motion of collective molecular motors. It is found that for a backbone flexibility exceeding a characteristic value (motor stiffness divided through the mean displacement between attached…
In scanning tunneling microscopy of molecules, an insulating buffer layer is often introduced to reduce interactions between adsorbed molecules and the substrate. Focusing on tunneling through the molecule's electronic transport gap, we…
The cytoskeleton -- a composite network of biopolymers, molecular motors, and associated binding proteins -- is a paradigmatic example of active matter. Particle transport through the cytoskeleton can range from anomalous and heterogeneous…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
Force fluctuations exhibited in focal adhesions (FAs) that connect a cell to its extracellular environment, point to the complex role of the underlying machinery that controls cell migration. To elucidate the explicit role of myosin motors…