Related papers: Ising Models of Cooperativity in Muscle Contractio…
The spatio-temporal organization of proteins and the associated morphological changes in membranes are of importance in cell signaling. Several mechanisms that promote the aggregation of proteins at low cell surface concentrations have been…
Using Monte Carlo simulations we study the dynamics of three-dimensional Ising models with nearest-, next-nearest-, and four-spin (plaquette) interactions. During coarsening, such models develop growing energy barriers, which leads to very…
Active colloids and externally actuated semi-flexible filaments provide basic building blocks for designing autonomously motile micro-machines. Here, we show that a passive semi-flexible filament can be actuated and transported by attaching…
The model for disordered actomyosin bundles recently derived by Oelz, in the work 'A viscous two-phase model for contractile actomyosin bundles' (Math. Biol., 68 (2013), 1653--1676) includes the effects of cross-linking of parallel and…
The inherent polarization gradients in tight optical tweezers can be used to couple the atomic spins to the two-body motion under the action of a microwave spin-flip transition, so that such a spin-motion coupling offers an important…
We consider the dynamics of a rigid filament in a motor protein assay under external loading. The motor proteins are modeled as active harmonic linkers with tail ends immobilized on a substrate. Their heads attach to the filament…
Filament based intracellular transport involves the collective action of molecular motor proteins. Experimental evidences suggest that microtubule (MT) filament bound motor proteins such as {\it kinesins} weakly interact among themselves…
Structure formation and constant reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton are key requirements for the function of living cells. Here we show that a minimal reconstituted system consisting of actin filaments, crosslinking molecules and…
After discussing the relevance of statistical physics in molecular recognition processes, we present a schematic model for ligand-receptor association based on an Ising chain. We discuss the possible behaviors of the affinity when the…
A data fitting procedure is devised and thoroughly tested to provide self-consistent estimates of the relevant mechanokinetic parameters involved in a plausible scheme underpinning the output of an ensemble of myosin II molecular motors…
Ising models, and the physical systems described by them, play a central role in generating entangled states for use in quantum metrology and quantum information. In particular, ultracold atomic gases, trapped ion systems, and Rydberg atoms…
Many of the processes that underly neural computation are carried out by ion channels embedded in the plasma membrane, a two-dimensional liquid that surrounds all cells. Recent experiments have demonstrated that this membrane is poised…
We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…
In this paper, we introduce a three-dimensional mathematical model of collagen contraction with microbuckling based on the two-dimensional model previously developed by the authors. The model both qualitatively and quantitatively replicates…
The cytoskeleton protein actin assembles into large bundles when supporting stresses in the cell, but grows into a fine branched network to induce cell motion. Such self-organization processes are studied in artificial networks of…
Living cells dynamically modulate the local morphologies of their actin cytoskeletons to perform biological functions, including force transduction, intracellular transport, and cell division. A major challenge is to understand how diverse…
The Dynamic Template is applied to muscle cells, and is shown to provide a feedback mechanism that can co-ordinate the rearrangements of cytoskeletal proteins that accompany contraction
Cell migration in fibreous extracellular matrix (ECM) is crucial to many physiological and pathological processes such as tissue regeneration, immune response and cancer progression. During migration, individual cells can generate active…
We study the dynamics of a spin facilitated Ising model with long range kinetic constraints. To formulate those restrictions within an analytical approach we introduce the size of a kinetic active environment of a given spin. Based on a…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…