Related papers: Measuring response functions of active materials f…
Scientists have long sought to understand how vascular networks supply blood and oxygen to cells throughout the body. Recent work focuses on principles that constrain how vessel size changes through branching generations from the aorta to…
The dynamics within active fluids, driven by internal activity of the self-propelled particles, is a subject of intense study in non-equilibrium physics. These systems have been explored using simulations, where the motion of a passive…
Living cells exhibit an important out-of-equilibrium mechanical activity, mainly due to the forces generated by molecular motors. These motor proteins, acting individually or collectively on the cytoskeleton, contribute to the violation of…
The viscoelastic response of complex fluids is length- and time-scale dependent, encoding information on intrinsic dynamic correlations and mesoscopic structure. We derive the subdominant response of such fluids at intermediate distances…
Many biological processes involve the action of molecular motors that interact with the cell cytoskeleton. Some processes, such as the transport of cargoes is achieved mainly by the action of individual motors. Other, such as cell motility…
Coupled length and time scales determine the dynamic behavior of polymers and underlie their unique viscoelastic properties. To resolve the long-time dynamics it is imperative to determine which time and length scales must be correctly…
Chemical affinities are responsible for driving active matter systems out of equilibrium. At the nano-scale, molecular machines interact with the surrounding environment and are subjected to external forces. The mechano-chemical coupling…
Active solids such as cell collectives, colloidal clusters, and active metamaterials exhibit diverse collective phenomena, ranging from rigid body motion to shape-changing mechanisms. The nonlinear dynamics of such active materials remains…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
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…
Cells control fluid flows with a spatial and temporal precision that far exceeds the capabilities of current microfluidic technologies. Cells achieve this superior spatio-temporal control by harnessing dynamic networks of cytoskeleton and…
Antifragility characterizes the benefit of a dynamical system derived from the variability in environmental perturbations. Antifragility carries a precise definition that quantifies a system's output response to input variability. Systems…
Interaction of electric fields with biological cells is indispensable for many physiological processes. Thermal electrical noise in the cellular environment has long been considered as the minimum threshold for detection of electrical…
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…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
Models of active nematics in biological systems normally require complexity arising from the hydrodynamics involved at the microscopic level as well as the viscoelastic nature of the system. Here we show that a minimal, space-independent,…
The Frequency Response Functions (FRFs) are the most widely used functions to characterise the dynamic behaviour of structures. The natural frequencies and damping behaviour can be easily and quickly detected from a Bode diagram. The modal…
Aims:We introduce analytical response functions and their main properties as an important diagnostic tool that help understand Stokes profile formation physics and the meaning of well-known behaviors of standard inversion codes of the…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…