Related papers: Active thermodynamic force driven mitochondrial al…
Cells can sense and respond to mechanical signals over relatively long distances across fibrous extracellular matrices. Here, we explore all of the key factors that influence long range force transmission in cell-populated collagen…
Based on a thermodynamic analysis of the kinetic model for the protein phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cycle, we study the ATP (or GTP) energy utilization of this ubiquitous biological signal transduction process. It is shown that the…
The vibrational dynamics of solids is described by phonons constituting basic collective excitations in equilibrium crystals. Here we consider an active crystal composed of self-propelled particles which bring the system into a…
The cell cytoskeleton is a striking example of "active" medium driven out-of-equilibrium by ATP hydrolysis. Such activity has been shown recently to have a spectacular impact on the mechanical and rheological properties of the cellular…
In pancreatic $\beta$-cells, calcium oscillation signal is the core part of glucose-stimulated insulin secretion. Intracellular calcium concentration oscillates in response to the intake of glucose, which triggers the exocytosis of insulin…
The glassy cytoplasm, crowded with bio-macromolecules, is fluidized in living cells by mechanical energy derived from metabolism. Characterizing the living cytoplasm as a non-equilibrium system is crucial in elucidating the intricate…
The physics of how molecules, organelles, and foreign objects move within living cells has been extensively studied in organisms ranging from bacteria to human cells. In mammalian cells, in particular, cellular vesicles move across the cell…
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…
Biological and engineered systems operate by coupling function to the transfer of heat and/or particles down a thermal or chemical gradient. In idealized \textit{deterministically} driven systems, thermodynamic control can be exerted…
Cells generally convert external nutrient resources to support metabolismand growth. Understanding the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion is essential to determine the general characteristics of cellular growth. Using a simple…
From biofilm and colony formation in bacteria to wound healing and embryonic development in multicellular organisms, groups of living cells must often move collectively. While considerable study has probed the biophysical mechanisms of how…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
Membrane transporters contribute to the regulation of the internal environment of cells by translocating substrates across cell membranes. Like all physical systems, the behaviour of membrane transporters is constrained by the laws of…
Thermal gradients lead to macroscopic fluid motion if a confining surface is present along the gradient. This fundamental nonequilibrium effect, known as thermo-osmosis, is held responsible for particle thermophoresis in colloidal…
Thermodynamics provides a transparent definition of the free energy of density functional theory (DFT), and of its derivatives - the potentials, at finite temperatures T. By taking the T to 0 limit, it is shown here that both DFT and…
Cell crawling crucially depends on the collective dynamics of the acto-myosin cytoskeleton. However, it remains an open question to what extent cell polarization and persistent motion depend on continuous regulatory mechanisms and…
Active-particle suspensions exhibit distinct polarization-density patterns in activity landscapes, even without anisotropic particle interactions. Such polarization without alignment forces is at work in motility-induced phase separation…
Animal cells form contractile structures to promote various functions, from cell motility to cell division. Force generation in these structures is often due to molecular motors such as myosin that require polar substrates for their…
Starting from the detailed catalytic mechanism of a biocatalyst we provide a coarse-graining procedure which, by construction, is thermodynamically consistent. This procedure provides stoichiometries, reaction fluxes (rate laws), and…
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…