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The stretchability of polymeric materials is critical to many applications such as stretchable electronics and soft robotics, yet the stretchability of conventional cross-linked linear polymers is limited by the entanglements between…

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…

This article presents a spiking neuroevolutionary system which implements memristors as plastic connections, i.e. whose weights can vary during a trial. The evolutionary design process exploits parameter self-adaptation and variable…

The toughness of a polymer material can increase significantly if two networks are combined into one material. This toughening effect is a consequence of a transition from a brittle to a ductile failure response. Although this transition…

The mechanical properties of cells are dominated by the cytoskeleton, an interconnected network of long elastic filaments. The connections between the filaments are provided by crosslinking proteins, which constitute, next to the filaments,…

Synthetic copolymers and biopolymers, such as polypeptides and double-stranded DNA, often exhibit strong variations in bending stiffness along their contour, which can significantly impact conformational behavior at larger scales. To…

The dynamic-mechanical response of flexible polymer networks is studied in the framework of tube model, in the limit of small affine deformations, using the approach based on Rayleighian dissipation function. The dynamic complex modulus G*…

Polymer translocation has long been a topic of interest in the field of biological physics given its relevance in both biological (protein and DNA/RNA translocation through nuclear and cell membranes) and technological processes (nanopore…

Prestrained elastic networks arise in a number of biological and technological systems ranging from the cytoskeleton of cells to tensegrity structures. To understand the response of such a network as a function of the prestrain, we consider…

The shortest path problem is related to many dynamic processes on networks, ranging from routing in communication networks to signaling in molecular interaction networks. When the network is fully known, the shortest path problem can be…

Fracture phenomena in soft materials span multiple length- and timescales. This poses a major challenge in computational modeling and predictive materials design. To pass quantitatively from molecular- to continuum scales, a precise…

Optimizing paths on networks is crucial for many applications, from subway traffic to Internet communication. As global path optimization that takes account of all path-choices simultaneously is computationally hard, most existing routing…

Physical aging in polymers is a fundamental yet poorly understood phenomenon, as diverse macromolecular systems exhibit remarkably similar slow dynamics. Through molecular dynamics simulations of physically crosslinked networks composed of…

How local stresses propagate through polymeric fluids, and, more generally, how macromolecular dynamics give rise to viscoelasticity are open questions vital to wide-ranging scientific and industrial fields. Here, to unambiguously connect…

Elastic network models (ENMs) are valuable and efficient tools for characterizing the collective internal dynamics of proteins based on the knowledge of their native structures. The increasing evidence that the biological functionality of…

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…

Bundles of polymer filaments are responsible for the rich and unique mechanical behaviors of many biomaterials, including cells and extracellular matrices. In fibrin biopolymers, whose nonlinear elastic properties are crucial for normal…

Double network (DN) materials exhibit anomalous strength and toughness that far exceed the sum of their constituents. While widely exploited, the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying this synergy remain elusive. Here, we show that a…

DNA and other biopolymers differ from classical polymers due to their torsional stiffness. This property changes the statistical character of their conformations under tension from a classical random walk to a problem we call the `torsional…

We present a mean-field dynamical theory for single semiflexible polymers which can precisely capture, without fitting parameters, recent fluorescence correlation spectroscopy results on single monomer kinetics of DNA strands in solution.…