Related papers: Bistability in filamentous actin through monomer-s…
Eukaryotic cells demonstrate a wide variety of dynamic patterns of filamentous actin (F-actin) and its regulators. Some of these patterns play important roles in cell functions, such as distinct motility modes, which motivate this study. We…
For various cell types and for lamellipodial fragments on flat surfaces, externally induced and spontaneous transitions between symmetric nonmoving states and polarized migration have been observed. This behavior is indicative of…
Actin is a filamentary protein which has many remarkable properties making it an ideal system for the study of the dynamics and mechanics of semi-flexible polymer solutions and gels; actin has a persistence length of over 10 microns and can…
Intermediate filaments form an essential structural network, spread throughout the cytoplasm and play a key role in cell mechanics, intracellular organization and molecular signaling. The maintenance of the network and its adaptation to the…
Actin is a globular protein which forms long filaments in the eukaryotic cytoskeleton, whose roles in cell function include structural support, contractile activity to intracellular signalling. We model actin filaments as two chains of…
The motility of a fish keratocyte on a flat substrate exhibits two distinct regimes: the non-migrating and the migrating one. In both configurations the shape is fixed in time and, when the cell is moving, the velocity is constant in…
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,…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
Actin is a globular protein which forms long polar filaments in eukaryotic. The actin filaments play roles of cytoskeleton, motility units , information processing and learning. We model actin filament as a double chain of finite state…
Actin filament, F-actin, is a semiflexible polymer with a negative charge, and is one of the main constituents on cell membranes. To clarify the effect of cross-talk between a phospholipid membrane and actin filaments in cells, we conducted…
We represent a filamentous actin molecule as a graph of finite-state machines (F-actin automaton). Each node in the graph takes three states --- resting, excited, refractory. All nodes update their states simultaneously and by the same…
Cell shape changes are largely controlled by the actin cytoskeleton, a dynamic filament network beneath the plasma membrane. Several cell types can form extended free-standing protrusions not supported by an extracellular substrate or…
A number of strange results have been reported for the twist elasticity of a semiflexible filament, actin. In particular dynamic and static methods for determining the torsional twist modulus give very different results. I show here that…
Actin is a key component of the cytoskeleton, which plays central roles in cell motility, division, growth, and tensile strength. To enable this wide range of transient mechanical processes and properties, networks of actin filaments…
Actin growth is a fundamental biophysical process and it is, at the same time, a prototypical example of diffusion-mediated surface growth. We formulate a coupled chemo-mechanical, one-dimensional growth model encompassing both material…
We study a reconstituted composite system consisting of an active microtubule network interdigitated with a passive network of entangled F-actin filaments. Increasing viscoelasticity of the F-actin network controls the emergent dynamics,…
Polymerization of actin proteins into dynamic structures is essential to eukaryotic cell life. This has motivated a large body of in vitro experiments measuring polymerization kinetics of individual filaments. Here we model these kinetics,…
Networks of filamentous actin (F-actin) are important for the mechanics of most animal cells. These cytoskeletal networks are highly dynamic, with a variety of actin-associated proteins that control cross-linking, polymerization and force…
The actin cytoskeleton is a semiflexible biopolymer network whose morphology is controlled by a wide range of biochemical and physical factors. Actin is known to undergo a phase transition from a single-filament state to a bundled state by…