Related papers: Using a Fast Adaptive Function Approximator to cal…
Biomolecular motor proteins that generate forces by consuming chemical energy obtained from ATP hydrolysis are pivotal for organizing broad cytoskeletal structures in living cells. The control of such cytoskeletal structures benefits…
A coarse-grained computational procedure based on the Finite Element Method is proposed to calculate the normal modes and mechanical response of proteins and their supramolecular assemblies. Motivated by the elastic network model, proteins…
The actin cytoskeleton is a key component in the machinery of eukaryotic cells, and it selfassembles out of equilibrium into a wide variety of biologically crucial structures. While the molecular mechanisms involved are well characterized,…
The formation of bundles composed of actin filaments and cross-linking proteins is an essential process in the maintenance of the cells' cytoskeleton. It has also been recreated by in-vitro experiments, where actin networks are routinely…
The rigorous convergence analysis of adaptive finite element methods for regularized variational models of quasi-static brittle fracture in strain-limiting elastic solids is presented. This work introduces two novel adaptive mesh refinement…
Recognition and binding of specific sites on DNA by proteins is central for many cellular functions such as transcription, replication, and recombination. In the process of recognition, a protein rapidly searches for its specific site on a…
The growing interest for comparing protein internal dynamics owes much to the realization that protein function can be accompanied or assisted by structural fluctuations and conformational changes. Analogously to the case of functional…
Cytoskeletal gels are prototyped to reproduce the mechanical contraction of the cytoskeleton in-vitro. They are composed of a polymer network (backbone), swollen by the presence of a liquid solvent, and active molecules (molecular motors,…
Computational docking methods can provide structural models of protein-protein complexes, but protein backbone flexibility upon association often thwarts accurate predictions. In recent blind challenges, medium or high accuracy models were…
Understanding the process of protein unfolding plays a crucial role in various applications such as design of folding-based protein engines. Using the well-established kinetostatic compliance (KCM)-based method for modeling of protein…
The phase behavior of charged rods in the presence of inter-rod linkers is studied theoretically as a model for the equilibrium behavior underlying the organization of actin filaments by linker proteins in the cytoskeleton. The presence of…
The cellular cytoskeleton is an active material, driven out of equilibrium by molecular motor proteins. It is not understood how the collective behaviors of cytoskeletal networks emerge from the properties of the network's constituent motor…
We design toy protein mimicking a machine-like function of an enzyme. Using an insight gained by the study of conformation space of compact lattice polymers, we demonstrate the possibility of a large scale conformational rearrangement which…
Understanding the dynamic behavior of proteins is critical to elucidating their functional mechanisms, yet generating realistic, temporally coherent trajectories of protein ensembles remains a significant challenge. In this work, we…
Active dynamic processes of cells are largely driven by the cytoskeleton, a complex and adaptable semiflexible polymer network, motorized by mechanoenzymes. Small dimensions, confined geome- tries and hierarchical structures make it…
The latest biological findings observe that the traditional motionless 'lock-and-key' theory is not generally applicable because the receptor and ligand are constantly moving. Nonetheless, remarkable changes in associated atomic sites and…
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…
Protein assembly plays an important role in the regulation of biological systems. The cytoskeleton assembly activity is provided by the binding cofactors GTP (guanidine triphosphate) or ATP(adenosine triphosphate) to monomeric protein, and…
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…
Many proteins in cells are capable of sensing and responding to piconewton scale forces, a regime in which conformational changes are small but significant for biological processes. In order to efficiently and effectively sample the…