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The design of desired behaviors in mechanical metamaterials has produced remarkable advances but has generally neglected two aspects - the inevitable presence of undesired behaviors and the role of dynamics in avoiding such behaviors.…
Many practical approximations in physics and engineering invoke a relatively long physical domain with a relatively thin cross-section. In this scenario we typically expect the system to have structures that vary slowly in the long…
Mechanical forces can selectively destabilize chemical bonds of molecular systems, particularly in biological and synthetic polymers. While experimental and theoretical methods have advanced our understanding of mechanochemical processes,…
We present a dynamic coarse-graining technique that allows to simulate the mechanical unfolding of biomolecules or molecular complexes on experimentally relevant time scales. It is based on Markov state models (MSM), which we construct from…
Transport of molecular motors along protein filaments in a half-closed geometry is a common feature of biologically relevant processes in cellular protrusions. Using a lattice gas model we study how the interplay between active and…
By using event-driven molecular dynamics simulation, we investigate effects of varying the area fraction of the smaller component on structure, compressibility factor and dynamics of the highly size-asymmetric binary hard-disk liquids. We…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
Actin and myosin drive many instances of force generation, deformation, and shape change in cells, tissues, and organisms. In particular, cytoskeletal actomyosin is remarkable in its adaptive architecture, responding to a host of…
Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…
Recent findings suggest that shell protein distribution and morphology of bacterial microcompartments regulate the chemical fluxes facilitating reactions which dictate their biological function. We explore how the morphology and component…
The formation and regulation of macromolecular complexes provides the backbone of most cellular processes, including gene regulation and signal transduction. The inherent complexity of assembling macromolecular structures makes current…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Despite decades of research, the modeling of moving contact lines has remained a formidable challenge in fluid dynamics whose resolution will impact numerous industrial, biological, and daily life applications. On the one hand, molecular…
The structural and dynamic properties of silica melts under high pressure are studied using molecular dynamics (MD) computer simulation. The interactions between the ions are modeled by a pairwise-additive potential, the so-called CHIK…
Collective behaviors in cellular systems are regulated not only by biochemical signalling pathways but also by intercellular mechanical forces, whose quantification in contractile monolayers remains poorly understood. Here, by integrating…
The shape that stem cells reach at the end of adhesion process influences their differentiation. Rearrangement of cytoskeleton and modification of intracellular tension may activate mechanotransduction pathways controlling cell commitment.…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
Developments in dynamical systems theory provides new support for the macroscale modelling of pdes and other microscale systems such as Lattice Boltzmann, Monte Carlo or Molecular Dynamics simulators. By systematically resolving subgrid…
The interaction of the actin cytoskeleton with cell-substrate adhesions is necessary for cell migration. While the trajectories of motile cells have a stochastic character, investigations of cell motility mechanisms rarely elaborate on the…