Related papers: Form and function in biological filaments: A physi…
All vertebrates are capable of performing various types of physical activity. Locomotor patterns are created by the cyclical coordinated work of the skeletal muscles. The organization of such a system in living organisms is responsible for…
We present a new method to identify large scale filaments and apply it to a cosmological simulation. Using positions of haloes above a given mass as node tracers, we look for filaments between them using the positions and masses of all the…
Intracellular transport is essential for maintaining proper cellular function in most eukaryotic cells, with perturbations in active transport resulting in several types of disease. Efficient delivery of critical cargos to specific…
Functional amyloid fibrils, once primarily associated with amyloidosis, are now recognized for their exceptional potential as biomaterials due to their unique structural features, including remarkable mechanical strength, high stability,…
The shape of a polymer plays an important role in determining its interactions with other molecules and with the environment, and is in turn affected by both of them. As a consequence, in the literature the shape properties of a chain in…
Living materials such as membranes, cytoskeletal assemblies, cell collectives and tissues can often be described as active solids -- materials that are energized from within, with elastic response about a well defined reference…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
We show that the formation of membrane tubes (or membrane tethers), which is a crucial step in many biological processes, is highly non-trivial and involves first order shape transitions. The force exerted by an emerging tube is a…
In the regime of cosmology and large-scale structure formation, filaments are vital components of the cosmic web. This study employs statistical methods to examine the formation, evolution, and cosmological constraints of filaments…
Conformational transitions are ubiquitous in biomolecular systems, have significant functional roles and are subject to evolutionary pressures. Here we provide a first theoretical framework for topological transition, i.e. conformational…
Soft matters whose constituents are deformable are ubiquitous in nature especially in biological systems-including cells and their organelles-as well as in foams and emulsions. The capacity for deformation in these soft materials gives rise…
We study a physical system which, while devoid of the complexity one usually associates with proteins, nevertheless displays a remarkable array of protein-like properties. The constructive hypothesis that this striking resemblance is not…
Flexible filaments moving in viscous fluids are ubiquitous in the natural microscopic world. For example, the swimming of bacteria and spermatozoa as well as important physiological functions at organ-level, such as the cilia-induced motion…
The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…
Microbial flagellates typically inhabit complex suspensions of polymeric material which can impact the swimming speed of motile microbes, filter-feeding of sessile cells, and the generation of biofilms. There is currently a need to better…
Cilia and flagella in biological systems often show large scale cooperative behaviors such as the synchronization of their beats in "metachronal waves". These are beautiful examples of emergent dynamics in biology, and are essential for…
Life presents fascinating examples of self-organization and emergent phenomena. In multi-cellular organisms, a multitude of cells interact to form and maintain highly complex body plans of well-defined size. In this thesis, we investigate…
The purpose of this paper is to study the shapes and stabilities of bio-membranes within the framework of exterior differential forms. After a brief review of the current status in theoretical and experimental studies on the shapes of…
Many bacteria use rotating helical flagellar filaments to swim. The filaments undergo polymorphic transformations in which the helical pitch and radius change abruptly. These transformations arise in response to mechanical loading, changes…
The elastic properties of two-component bilayer membranes are studied using a coarse grain model for amphiphilic molecules. The two species of amphiphiles considered here differ only in their length. Molecular Dynamics simulations are…