Related papers: Dissipation and recovery in collagen fibrils under…
Disordered fibrous networks are ubiquitous in nature as major structural components of living cells and tissues. The mechanical stability of networks generally depends on the degree of connectivity: only when the average number of…
Networks with only central force interactions are floppy when their average connectivity is below an isostatic threshold. Although such networks are mechanically unstable, they can become rigid when strained. It was recently shown that the…
Persistent activity is postulated to drive neural network plasticity and learning. To investigate its underlying cellular mechanisms, we developed a biophysically tractable model that explains the emergence, sustenance, and eventual…
Bone is a multiscale heterogeneous materiel of which principal function is to support the body structure and to resist mechanical loading and fractures. Bone strength does not depend only on the quantity and quality of bone which is…
Cross-links are considered to be a key component of collagen fibrils as they can change the fibrillar behavior in various ways. Advanced-Glycation Endproducts (AGEs), one particular type of cross-links, have been shown to accumulate and…
We use optical tweezers microrheology and fluorescence microscopy to apply nonlinear microscale strains to entangled and crosslinked actin networks, and measure the resulting stress and actin filament deformations. We couple nonlinear…
It has been supposed that the interplay of elasticity and activity plays a key role in triggering the non-equilibrium behaviors in biological systems. However, the experimental model system is missing to investigate the spatiotemporally…
A new strain energy function for the hyperelastic modelling of ligaments and tendons whose fascicles have a helical arrangement of fibrils is derived. The stress-strain response of a single fascicle whose fibrils exhibit varying levels of…
The paper addresses a common assumption of elastoplastic modeling: that the recoverable, elastic strain increment is unaffected by alterations of the elastic moduli that accompany loading. This assumption is found to be false for a granular…
A model system inspired by recent experiments on the dynamics of a folded protein under the influence of a sinusoidal force is investigated and found to replicate many of the response characteristics of such a system. The essence of the…
Most of crystalline materials exhibit a hysteresis on their deformation curve when mechanically loaded in alternating directions. This Bauschinger effect is the signature of mechanisms existing at the atomic scale and controlling the…
Vitrimers are a special class of polymers that undergo dynamic cross-linking under thermal stimuli. Their ability to exchange covalent bonds can be harnessed to mitigate damage in a composite or to achieve recyclable aerospace composites.…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells has many types of crosslinkers. The mechanical interplay between these different crosslinker types is an open issue in cytoskeletal mechanics. We develop a framework to study the cooperativity and…
Materials with spin-crossover (SCO) properties hold great potentials in information storage and therefore have received a lot of concerns in the recent decades. The hysteresis phenomena accompanying SCO is attributed to the intermolecular…
When a elastic body is moved quasistatically back and forth over a surface, the friction of the interface is experimentally observed to circulate through a hysteretic loop. The asymptotic behaviour of the hysteresis loop is approached…
Collagen is the most abundant extracellular-matrix protein in mammals and the main structural and load-bearing element of connective tissues. Collagen networks show remarkable strain-stiffening properties which tune the mechanical functions…
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…
Collagen fibrils are the most important structural component of tendons. Their crimped structure and parallel arrangement within the tendon lead to a distinctive non-linear stress-strain curve when a tendon is stretched. Microstructural…
Recent studies in mammalian hearts show that left ventricular wall thickening is an important mechanism for systolic ejection and that during contraction the cardiac muscle develops significant stresses in the muscular cross-fiber…
Collagen is the most abundant extracellular-network-forming protein in animal biology and is important in both natural and artificial tissues, where it serves as a material of great mechanical versatility. This versatility arises from its…