Related papers: How Molecular Motors' Interaction Shapes Flagellar…
The eukaryotic flagellum beats periodically, driven by the oscillatory dynamics of molecular motors, to propel cells and pump fluids. Small, but perceivable fluctuations in the beat of individual flagella have physiological implications for…
The bacterial flagellar motor drives the rotation of flagellar filaments and enables many species of bacteria to swim. Torque is generated by interaction of stator units, anchored to the peptidoglycan cell wall, with the rotor. Recent…
The present habilitation thesis in theoretical biological physics addresses two central dynamical processes in cells and organisms: (i) active motility and motility control and (ii) self-organized pattern formation. The unifying theme is…
The cooperative binding of molecular agents onto a substrate is pervasive in living systems. To study whether a system shows cooperativity, one can rely on a fluctuation analysis of quantities such as the number of substrate-bound units and…
Three problems in the statistical mechanics of models for an assembly of molecular motors interacting with cytoskeletal filaments are reviewed. First, a description of the hydrodynamical behaviour of density-density correlations in…
We discuss a two-dimensional model for the dynamics of axonemal deformations driven by internally generated forces of molecular motors. Our model consists of an elastic filament pair connected by active elements. We derive the dynamic…
Mesoscopic fluctuations reveal stochastic dynamics of molecules in both inanimate and living matter. We investigate how small-number fluctuations shape the collective dynamics of molecular motors using motile cilia as model system. We…
This paper focuses on studying a model for molecular motors responsible for the bending of the axoneme in the flagella of microorganisms. The model is a coupled system of partial differential equations inspired by J\"ulicher et al. or…
We have used numerical simulations to investigate how the properties of motor proteins control the dynamical behavior of a driven flexible filament. The filament is pinned at one end and positioned on top of a patch of anchored motor…
The modeling of the beating of cilia and flagella in fluids is a particularly active field of study, given the biological relevance of these organelles. Various mathematical models have been proposed to represent the nonlinear dynamics of…
Microscale fluid flows generated by ensembles of beating eukaryotic flagella are crucial to fundamental processes such as development, motility and sensing. Despite significant experimental and theoretical progress, the underlying physical…
Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…
Marine bacterium Vibrio alginolyticus uses a single polar flagellum to navigate in an aqueous environment. Similar to Escherichia coli cells, the polar flagellar motor has two states; when the motor is counter-clockwise, the cell swims…
The bacterial flagellar motor plays a crucial role in both bacterial locomotion and chemotaxis. Recent experiments reveal that the switching dynamics of the motor depends on the motor rotation speed, and thus the motor torque,…
Active tissues exhibit tension fluctuations that are correlated in space and time. We study a minimal overdamped surface model in which such fluctuations enter as a zero-mean, multiplicative modulation of the local surface tension. Although…
Many swimming bacteria are propelled by flagellar motors that stochastically switch between the clockwise and counterclockwise rotation direction. While the switching dynamics are one of the most important characteristics of flagellar…
Using a simple model, we study the fluctuating dynamics of inextensible, semiflexible polar filaments interacting with active and directed force generating centres such as molecular motors. Taking into account the fact that the activity…
We show that the correlated stochastic fluctuation of the friction coefficient can give rise to long-range directional motion of a particle undergoing Brownian random walk in a constant periodic energy potential landscape. The occurrence of…
Inspired by recent experiments on the dynamics of particles and polymers in artificial cytoskeletons and in cells, we introduce a modified Langevin equation for a particle in an environment that is a viscoelastic medium and that is brought…
We demonstrate that internal pivot-like defects, arising from rigor mutant motor proteins that bind without stepping, fundamentally reshape the dynamics of semiflexible filaments in two-dimensional motility assays. Using large-scale…