Related papers: Allosteric propagation of curvature along filament
Allosteric interactions occur when binding at one part of a complex affects the interactions at another part. Allostery offers a high degree of control in multi-species processes, and these interactions play a crucial role in many…
We investigate an analytically tractable toy model for thermally induced polymorphic dynamics of cooperatively rearranging biofilaments - like microtubules. The proposed 4 -block model, which can be seen as a coarse-grained approximation of…
Allostery, the phenomenon by which the perturbation of a molecule at one site alters its behavior at a remote functional site, enables control over biomolecular function. Allosteric modulation is a promising avenue for drug discovery and is…
The growth dynamics of rigid biopolymers, consisting of $N$ parallel protofilaments, is investigated theoretically using simple approximate models. In our approach, the structure of a polymer's growing end and lateral interactions between…
A model for polar filaments interacting via molecular motor complexes is investigated which exhibits bifurcations to spatial patterns. It is shown that the homogeneous distribution of filaments, such as actin or microtubules, may become…
The cytoskeleton is an important subsystem of cells that is involved for example in cell division and locomotion. It consists of filaments that are cross-linked by molecular motors that can induce relative sliding between filaments and…
Allostery refers to the puzzling phenomenon of long-range communication between distant sites in proteins. Despite its importance in biomolecular regulation and signal transduction, the underlying dynamical process is not well understood.…
Biofilament-motor protein complexes are ubiquitous in biology and drive the transport of cargo vital for many fundamental cellular processes. As they move, motor proteins exert compressive forces on the filaments to which they are attached,…
The intermittent transition between slow growth and rapid shrinkage in polymeric assemblies is termed dynamic instability, a feature observed in a variety of biochemically distinct assemblies including microtubules, actin and their…
We study the over-damped dynamics of individual one-dimensional elastic filaments subjected to a chiral active force which propels each point of the filament at a fixed angle relative to the tangent vector of the filament at that point.…
A simple stochastic model which describes microtubule dynamics and explicitly takes into account the relevant biochemical processes is presented. The model incorporates binding and unbinding of monomers and random phosphate release inside…
Fiberboids are active filaments trapped at the interface of two phases, able of harnessing energy (and matter) fluxes across the interface in order to produce a rolling-like self-propulsion. We discuss several table-top examples and develop…
Tubular lattices are ubiquitous in nature and technology. Microtubules and nanotubes of all kinds act as important pillars of biological cells and the man-made nano-world. We show that when prestress is introduced in such structures,…
Cellular locomotion often involves the motion of thin, elastic filaments, such as cilia and flagella, in viscous environments. The manuscript serves as a general introduction to the topic of modelling microscale elastohydrodynamics. We…
An aster of microtubules is a set of flexible polar filaments with dynamic plus-ends, which irradiate from a common location at which the minus ends of the filaments are found. Processive soluble oligomeric motor complexes can bind…
Controlling the size and shape of assembled structures is a fundamental challenge in self-assembly, and is highly relevant in material design and biology. Here, we show that specific, but promiscuous, short-range binding interactions make…
The shape assumed by a slender elastic structure is a function both of the geometry of the space in which it exists and the forces it experiences. We explore by experiments and theoretical analysis, the morphological phase-space of a…
We present the results of smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations investigating the evolution and fragmentation of filaments that are accreting from a turbulent medium. We show that the presence of turbulence, and the resulting…
One of the central appealing properties of magnetic gels and elastomers is that their elastic moduli can reversibly be adjusted from outside by applying magnetic fields. The impact of the internal magnetic particle distribution on this…
Bundles of filamentous polymers are primary structural components of a broad range of cytoskeletal structures, and their mechanical properties play key roles in cellular functions ranging from locomotion to mechanotransduction and…