Related papers: Mitochondrial mechanics nucleates axonal jamming a…
Mitochondrial networks exhibit a variety of complex behaviors, including coordinated cell-wide oscillations of energy states as well as a phase transition (depolarization) in response to oxidative stress. Since functional and structural…
Nuclear pore complexes are constantly confronted by large fluxes of macromolecules and macromolecular complexes that need to get into and out of the nucleus. Such bi-directional traffic occurring in a narrow channel can easily lead to…
Collective cell migration is essential for a wide range of biological processes such as: morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer spreading. However, it is well known that migrating epithelial collectives frequently undergo jamming, stay…
The motor-driven intracellular transport of vesicles to synaptic targets in the axons and dendrites of neurons plays a crucial role in normal cell function. Moreover, stimulus-dependent regulation of active transport is an important…
In eukaryotic cells, mitochondria form networks that range from highly fused interconnected structures to fragmented populations of individual organelles that undergo transient interactions. These structures can be described as temporal…
The organization of the axonal cytoskeleton is a key determinant of the normal function of an axon, which is a long thin projection away from a neuron. Under normal conditions two axonal cytoskeletal polymers microtubules and neurofilaments…
Traffic jams are an everyday hindrance to transport, and typically arise when many vehicles have the same or a similar destination. We show, however, that even when uniformly distributed in space and uncorrelated, targets have a crucial…
Molecular motors perform active movements along cytoskeletal filaments and drive the traffic of organelles and other cargo particles in cells. In contrast to the macroscopic traffic of cars, however, the traffic of molecular motors is…
Cytoskeletal networks, which are essentially motor-filament assemblies, play a major role in many developmental processes involving structural remodeling and shape changes. These are achieved by nonequilibrium self-organization processes…
Molecular motors are involved in key transport processes inside actin-based cellular protrusions. The motors carry cargo proteins to the protrusion tip which participate in regulating the actin polymerization, and play a key role in…
In several pathological conditions, such as coronavirus infections, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, the physiological shape of axons is altered and a periodic sequence of bulges appears. Experimental evidences…
The origins of the large differences observed to the rates with which the diverse particles are conveyed along axonal microtubules are still a matter of debate in the literature. There is evidence that certain neurodegenerative diseases may…
Here we study a driven lattice gas model for microtubule depolymerizing molecular motors, where traffic jams of motors induce stochastic switching between microtubule growth and shrinkage. We term this phenomenon \enquote{traffic dynamic…
We scrutinize the temporally-resolved speed of active cargo transport in living cells, and show intermittent bursting motions. These nonlinear fluctuations follow a scaling law over several decades of time and space, the statistical…
Axons functionally link the somato-dendritic compartment to synaptic terminals. Structurally and functionally diverse, they accomplish a central role in determining the delays and reliability with which neuronal ensembles communicate. By…
Dense particulate suspensions can not only increase their viscosity and shear thicken under external forcing, but also jam into a solid-like state that is fully reversible when the force is removed. An impact on the surface of a dense…
Transitions from quiescence to collective migration in epithelia underlie wound healing and cancer invasion, yet their physical origin remains poorly understood. Here we show that quiescent epithelial monolayers store spatially contractile…
During development and under normal physiological conditions, biological tissues are continuously subjected to substantial mechanical stresses. In response to large deformations cells in a tissue must undergo multicellular rearrangements in…
We investigate morphologies of proliferating cellular tissues using a newly developed numerical simulation model for mechanical cell division and migration in 2D. The model is applied to a bimodal mixture consisting of stiff cells with a…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…