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Much of interesting complex biological behaviour arises from collective properties. Important information about collective behaviour lies in the time and space structure of fluctuations around average properties, and two-point correlation…
Correlation functions, such as static and dynamic structure factors, offer a versatile approach to analyzing atomic-scale structure and dynamics. By having access to the full dynamics from atomistic simulations, they serve as valuable tools…
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…
Biological membranes and vesicles play a central role in living systems, forming dynamic interfaces that regulate cellular organization and function. Classical descriptions of membrane mechanics that are rooted in equilibrium statistical…
Mathematical methods provide useful framework for the analysis and design of complex systems. In newer contexts such as biology, however, there is a need to both adapt existing methods as well as to develop new ones. Using a combination of…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Active materials form a class of far-from-equilibrium systems that are driven internally and exhibit self-organization which can be harnessed to perform mechanical work. Inspired by experiments on synthetic active networks we examine limits…
Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Modeling dynamical systems plays a crucial role in capturing and understanding complex physical phenomena. When physical models are not sufficiently accurate or hardly describable by analytical formulas, one can use generic function…
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…
A multi-time extension of a density correlation function is introduced to reveal temporal information about dynamical heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids. We utilize a multi-time correlation function that is analogous to the higher-order…
The precise details of how myosin-V coordinates the biochemical reactions and mechanical motions of its two head elements to engineer effective processive molecular motion along actin filaments remain unresolved. We compare a quantitative…
Detecting and quantifying non-equilibrium activity is essential for studying internally driven assemblies, including synthetic active matter and complex living systems such as cells or tissue. We discuss a non-invasive approach of measuring…
Active matter agents consume internal energy or extract energy from the environment for locomotion and force generation. Already rather generic models, such as ensembles of active Brownian particles, exhibit phenomena, which are absent at…
Motor proteins drive persistent motion and self-organisation of cytoskeletal filaments. However, state-of-the-art microscopy techniques and continuum modelling approaches focus on large length and time scales. Here, we perform…
Experiments suggest that the migration of some cells in the three-dimensional extra cellular matrix bears strong resemblance to one-dimensional cell migration. Motivated by this observation, we construct and study a minimal one-dimensional…
Myosin II molecular motors slide actin filaments relatively to each other and are essential for force generation, motility and mechanosensing in animal cells. For non-muscle cells, evolution has resulted in three different isoforms, which…
Recent experimental studies, both in vivo and in vitro, have revealed that membrane components that bind to the cortical actomyosin meshwork are driven by active fluctuations, whereas membrane components that do not bind to cortical actin…
Biological systems achieve precise control over ambient fluids through the self-organization of active protein structures including flagella, cilia, and cytoskeletal networks. In active structures individual proteins consume chemical energy…