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Posttranslational modifications (PTMs) are an integral component to how cells respond to perturbation. While experimental advances have enabled improved PTM identification capabilities, the same throughput for characterizing how structural…

The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…

With the formal construction of a thermodynamic spring, I describe the mechanics, energetics, entropy, and kinetics of a binary mechanical model system. A protein that transitions between two metastable structural states behaves as a…

The molecular machinery of life is largely created via self-organisation of individual molecules into functional assemblies. Minimal coarse-grained models, where a whole macromolecule is represented by a small number of particles, can be of…

Magnetic gels with embedded micro/nano-sized magnetic particles in crosslinked polymer networks can be actuated by external magnetic fields, with changes in their internal microscopic structures and macroscopic mechanical properties. We…

The relationship between structure and dynamics in glassy fluids remains an intriguing open question. Recent work has shown impressive advances in our ability to predict local dynamics using structural features, most notably due to the use…

Driven suspensions, where energy is input at a particle scale, are a framework for understanding general principles of out-of-equilibrium organization. A large number of simple interacting units can give rise to non-trivial structure and…

Inertial lift forces are exploited within inertial microfluidic devices to position, segregate, and sort particles or droplets. However the forces and their focusing positions can currently only be predicted by numerical simulations, making…

It is now well established that materials are stronger when their dimensions are reduced to submicron scale. However, what happens at dimensions such as a few tens of nanometers or lower remains largely unknown, with conflicting reports on…

The widely-accepted intuition that the important properties of solids are determined by a few key variables underpins many methods in physics. Though this reductionist paradigm is applicable in many physical problems, its utility can be…

We review the physical properties of macromolecular networks, consisting of semiflexible polymers such as actin. We start by giving a theoretical analysis of the conformational statistics and mechanical response of single filaments.…

Morphologies of adsorbed molecular films are of interest in a wide range of applications. To study the epitaxial growth of these systems in computer simulations requires access to long time and length scales and one typically resorts to…

The binding of small metal ions to complex macromolecular structures is typically dominated by strong local interactions of the ion with its nearest ligands. For this reason, it is often possible to understand the microscopic origin of ion…

The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…

In spite of decades of research, much remains to be discovered about folding: the detailed structure of the initial (unfolded) state, vestigial folding instructions remaining only in the unfolded state, the interaction of the molecule with…

Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…

Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…

Amorphous silicon nitride (a-SiN) is a material which has found wide application due to its excellent mechanical and electrical properties. Despite the significant effort devoted in understanding how the microscopic structure influences the…

With potential relevance to biomechanics, an interesting problem in statistical mechanics not previously solved is a binary mechanical model system. Discrete chemical states of proteins are often associated with discrete metastable…

We develop an effective model to describe the dynamics of a system of particle moving in circular configurations around a central mass, by considering the continuum limit of the angular distribution, to obtain the stable configurations for…