Related papers: Active Intracellular Mechanics: A Key to Cellular …
Mechanical forces generated by myosin II molecular motors drive diverse cellular processes, most notably shape change, division and locomotion. These forces may be transmitted over long range through the cytoskeletal medium - a disordered,…
Motile cilia are a striking example of functional cellular organelle, conserved across all the eukaryotic species. Motile cilia allow swimming of cells and small organisms and transport of liquids across epithelial tissues. Whilst the…
Many biological materials must couple mechanical strength with the ability to rapidly self-assemble at a specific location. In particular, biomolecular condensates readily self-assemble via phase separation, but may also need to resist…
Many essential cellular functions depend on the viscoelastic properties of the cytoplasm. While techniques such as optical tweezers and atomic force microscopy can measure these properties, their reliance on localized probes prevents…
The interior of a living cell is an active, fluctuating, and crowded environment. Yet, it maintains a high level of coherent organization, which is readily apparent in the intracellular transport network. Membrane-bound compartments called…
Knowledge of the mechanical properties of the aorta is essential as important concerns regarding the treatment of aortic pathologies, such as atherosclerosis, aneurysms and dissections, are fundamentally mechanobiological. A comprehensive…
Live cells have ambiguous mechanical properties. They were often described as either elastic solids or viscoelastic fluids and have recently been classified as soft glassy materials characterized by weak power-law rheology. Nonlinear…
The dynamics of active viscoelastic surfaces plays an important role in biological systems. One prominent example is the actin cortex, a thin bio-polymer sheet underneath the outer membrane of biological cells which combines active…
In living cells, molecular motors convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Its thermodynamic energy efficiency, i.e. the ratio of output mechanical work to input chemical energy, is usually high. However, using two-state models, we…
Understanding protein folding has been one of the great challenges in biochemistry and molecular biophysics. Over the past 50 years, many thermodynamic and kinetic studies have been performed addressing the stability of globular proteins.…
Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…
In biological settings membranes typically interact locally with other membranes or the extracellular matrix in the exterior, as well as with internal cellular structures such as the cytoskeleton. Characterization of the dynamic properties…
Living cells adapt and respond actively to the mechanical properties of their environment. In addition to biochemical mechanotransduction, evidence exists for a myosin-dependent, purely mechanical sensitivity to the stiffness of the…
The work is devoted to the analysis of cell population dynamics where cells make a choice between differentiation and apoptosis. This choice is based on the values of intracellular proteins whose concentrations are described by a system of…
Cell migration is a fundamental process for life and is highly dependent on the dynamical and mechanical properties of the cytoskeleton. Intensive physical and biochemical crosstalk between actin, microtubules, and intermediate filaments…
This article reviews the mechanical bidomain model, a mathematical description how the extracellular matrix and intracellular cytoskeleton are coupled by integrin proteins. The fundamental hypothesis is that differences between…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
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…
Molecular motors are in charge of almost every process in the life cycle of cells, such as protein synthesis, DNA replication, and cell locomotion, hence being of crucial importance for understanding the cellular dynamics. However, given…
Understanding the values and origin of fundamental physical constants, one of the grandest challenges in modern science, has been discussed in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology. More recently, it was realised that fundamental…