Related papers: Mechanics promotes coherence in heterogeneous acti…
Bacteria commonly live in structured communities that affect human health and influence ecological systems. Heterogeneous populations, such as motile and non-motile populations, often coexist in bacteria communities. Motile subpopulations…
The spontaneous emergence of contraction-inducing electrical activity in the uterus at the beginning of labor remains poorly understood, partly due to the seemingly contradictory observation that isolated uterine cells are not spontaneously…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…
When swimming in close proximity, some microorganisms such as spermatozoa synchronize their flagella. Previous work on swimming sheets showed that such synchronization requires a geometrical asymmetry in the flagellar waveforms. Here we…
Exerting fluctuations is a part of our daily life: traffic noise, heartbeat, opinion poll, currency exchange rate, electrical current, chemical reactions - they all permanently fluctuate. One of the most important questions is why the…
As liquids approach the glass transition temperature, dynamical heterogeneity emerges as a crucial universal feature of their behavior. Dynamic facilitation, where local motion triggers further motion nearby, plays a major role in this…
Synchrony is inevitable in many oscillating systems -- from the canonical alignment of two ticking grandfather clocks, to the mutual entrainment of beating flagella or spiking neurons. Yet both biological and manmade systems provide…
We provide a rather simple proof of a homogenization result for the bidomain model of cardiac electrophysiology. Departing from a microscopic cellular model, we apply the theory of two-scale convergence to derive the bidomain model. To…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
Based on symmetry consideration of migration and shape deformations, we formulate phenomenologically the dynamics of cell crawling in two dimensions. Forces are introduced to change the cell shape. The shape deformations induce migration of…
We study, both analytically and numerically, the dynamics of mechanical oscillators kept in motion by a feedback force, which is generated electronically from a signal produced by the oscillators themselves. This kind of self-sustained…
Realistic large-scale networks display an heterogeneous distribution of connectivity weights, that might also randomly vary in time. We show that depending on the level of heterogeneity in the connectivity coefficients, different…
The twisting and writhing of a cell body and associated mechanical stresses is an underappreciated constraint on microbial self-propulsion. Multi-flagellated bacteria can even buckle and writhe under their own activity as they swim through…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
A coupled map is suggested to investigate various spatial or temporal designs in biology: Several cells (or tissues) in an organ are considered as connected to each other in terms of some molecular diffusions or electrical potential…
We study a generic model for the polarisation and motility of self-propelled soft objects, biological cells or biomimetic systems, interacting with a viscous substrate. The active forces generated by the cell on the substrate are modelled…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
We study synchronization of an array of rotors on a substrate that are coupled by hydrodynamic interaction. The rotors that are modeled by an effective rigid body, are driven by an internal torque and exerts an active force on the…
Actomyosin networks are major structural components of the cell. They provide mechanical integrity and allow dynamic remodeling of eukaryotic cells, self-organizing into the diverse patterns essential for development. We provide a…
We examine the stochastic dynamics of two enzymes that are mechanically coupled to each other, e.g., through an elastic substrate or a fluid medium. The enzymes undergo conformational changes during their catalytic cycle, which itself is…