Related papers: Motor crosslinking augments elasticity in active n…

Microfluidics involves the manipulation of flows at the microscale, typically requiring external power sources to generate pressure gradients. Alternatively, harnessing flows from active fluids, which are usually chaotic, has been proposed…

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…

Active nematics are an important new paradigm in soft condensed matter systems. They consist of rod-like components with an internal driving force pushing them out of equilibrium. The resulting fluid motion exhibits chaotic advection, in…

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…

Macromolecules can gain special properties by adopting knotted conformations, but engineering knotted macromolecules is a challenging task. Here we surprisingly observed that knotting can be very effectively produced in active polymers.…

Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…

Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…

The mineralized collagen fibril is the main building block of hard tissues and it directly affects the macroscopic mechanics of biological tissues such as bone. The mechanical behavior of the fibril itself is determined by its structure:…

Being intrinsically nonequilibrium, active materials can potentially perform functions that would be thermodynamically forbidden in passive materials. However, active systems have diverse local attractors that correspond to distinct…

The emergence of macroscopic order and patterns is a central paradigm in systems of (self-)propelled agents, and a key component in the structuring of many biological systems.The relationships between the ordering process and the underlying…

A study is made of how active membrane proteins can modify the long wavelength mechanics of fluid membranes. The activity of the proteins is modelled as disturbing the protein surroundings through non-local force distributions of which a…

We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension…

It is well stablished that confinement of supercooled liquids in nano-pores induces various effects as a strong modification of the dynamics and a layering of the local structure. In this work we raise the issue as how these confinement…

Self organization mechanisms are essential for the cytoskeleton to adapt to the requirements of living cells. They rely on the intricate interplay of cytoskeletal filaments, crosslinking proteins and molecular motors. Here we present an in…

Hydrodynamics of complex fuids with multiple order parameters is governed by a set of dynamic equations with many material constants, of which only some are easily measurable. We present a unique example of a dynamic magneto-optic coupling…

Motor proteins that specifically interact with the ends of cytoskeletal filaments can induce filament depolymerization. A phenomenological description of this process is presented. We show that under certain conditions motors dynamically…

Active nematic fluids confined in narrow channels generate spontaneous flows when the activity is sufficiently intense. Recently, it was shown that if the molecular anchoring at the channel walls is conflicting flows are initiated even in…

The effects of an electric field on the flow patterns and defect dynamics of two-dimensional active nematics are numerically investigated. We found that field-induced director reorientation causes anisotropic active turbulence characterized…

Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…

Conventional kinesin is a two-headed homodimeric motor protein, which is able to walk along microtubules processively by hydrolyzing ATP. Its neck linkers, which connect the two motor domains and can undergo a docking/undocking transition,…