Related papers: L\'evy distributed fluctuations in the living cell…
The eukaryotic cell's cytoskeleton is a prototypical example of an active material: objects embedded within it are driven by molecular motors acting on the cytoskeleton, leading to anomalous diffusive behavior. Experiments tracking the…
The actin cortex is a thin layer of actin filaments and myosin motors beneath the outer membrane of animal cells. It determines the cells' mechanical properties and forms important morphological structures. Physical descriptions of the…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
In cellular vortical flows, namely arrays of counter-rotating vortices, short but flexible filaments can show simple random walks through their stretch-coil interactions with flow stagnation points. Here, we study the dynamics of semi-rigid…
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…
A Levy walk is a non-Markovian stochastic process in which the elementary steps of the walker consist of motion with constant speed in randomly chosen directions and for a random period of time. The time of flight is chosen from a…
The cytoskeleton -- a composite network of biopolymers, molecular motors, and associated binding proteins -- is a paradigmatic example of active matter. Particle transport through the cytoskeleton can range from anomalous and heterogeneous…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…
Living cells adapt and respond actively to the mechanical properties of their environment. In addition to biochemical mechanotransduction, evidence exists for a myosin-dependent, purely mechanical sensitivity to the stiffness of the…
We investigate the effect of stress fluctuations on the stochastic dynamics of an inclusion embedded in a viscous gel. We show that, in non-equilibrium systems, stress fluctuations give rise to an effective attraction towards the boundaries…
In living matter, shape fluctuations induced by acto-myosin are usually studied in vitro via reconstituted gels, whose properties are controlled by changing the concentrations of actin, myosin and cross-linkers. Such an approach…
Tissue remodelling in diverse developmental contexts require cell shape changes that have been associated with pulsation and flow of the actomyosin cytoskeleton. Here we describe the dynamics of the actomyosin cytoskeleton as a confined…
The cytoskeleton is a model active matter system that controls diverse cellular processes from division to motility. While both active actomyosin dynamics and actin-microtubule interactions are key to the cytoskeleton's versatility and…
Flows over remarkably long distances are crucial to the functioning of many organisms, across all kingdoms of life. Coordinated flows are fundamental to power deformations, required for migration or development, or to spread resources and…
Full orbit dynamics of charged particles in a $3$-dimensional helical magnetic field in the presence of $\alpha$-stable L\'evy electrostatic fluctuations and linear friction modeling collisional Coulomb drag is studied via Monte Carlo…
Cells can show not only spontaneous movement but also tactic responses to environmental signals. Since the former can be regarded as the basis to realize the latter, playing essential roles in various cellular functions, it is important to…
In this work, we study in detail the distribution of stochastic forces generated by the molecular motors activity, in the actin cortex of pre-muscular cells. By combining active and passive rheology experiments, performed on the same…
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…
The L\'evy-Lorentz gas describes the motion of a particle on the real line in the presence of a random array of scattering points, whose distances between neighboring points are heavy-tailed i.i.d. random variables with finite mean. The…
Actomyosin networks are major structural components of the cell. They provide mechanical integrity and allow dynamic remodeling of eukaryotic cells, self-organizing into the diverse patterns essential for development. We provide a…