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Despite extensive progress in characterizing the emergent behavior of active matter, the microscopic origins of self-diffusion in interacting active systems remain poorly understood. Here, we develop a framework that quantitatively links…
We numerically examine the transport of active run-and-tumble particles driven with a drift force over random disordered landscapes comprised of fixed obstacles. For increasing run lengths, the net particle transport initially increases…
Congestion limits the efficiency of transport networks ranging from highways to the internet. Fungal hyphal networks are studied as an examples of optimal biological transport networks, but the scheduling and direction of traffic to avoid…
Transport in soft jammed materials is often described as fluid motion through a fixed structure, leading naturally to capillary based descriptions. This picture appears particularly appropriate in strongly jammed systems, where structural…
Molecular signalling in living cells occurs at low copy numbers and is thereby inherently limited by the noise imposed by thermal diffusion. The precision at which biochemical receptors can count signalling molecules is intimately related…
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
The emergence of a body axis is a fundamental step in the development of multicellular organisms. In simple systems such as $\textit{Hydra}$, growing evidence suggests that mechanical forces generated by collective cellular activity play a…
Macroscopic properties and shapes of biological tissues depend on the remodelling of cell-cell junctions at the microscopic scale. We propose a theoretical framework that couples a vertex model of solid confluent tissues with the dynamics…
The traffic of molecular motors which interact through mutual exclusion is studied theoretically for half-open tube-like compartments. These half-open tubes mimic the shapes of axons. The mutual exclusion leads to traffic jams or density…
Transport of molecular motors along protein filaments in a half-closed geometry is a common feature of biologically relevant processes in cellular protrusions. Using a lattice gas model we study how the interplay between active and…
Cells are strongly out-of-equilibrium systems driven by continuous energy supply. They carry out many vital functions requiring active transport of various ingredients and organelles, some being small, others being large. The cytoskeleton,…
From the Golgi apparatus to endosomes, organelles in the endomembrane system exhibit complex and varied morphologies that are often related to their function. Such membrane-bound organelles operate far from equilibrium due to directed…
Living cells move thanks to assemblies of actin filaments and myosin motors that range from very organized striated muscle tissue to disordered intracellular bundles. The mechanisms powering these disordered structures are debated, and all…
Amorphous solids tend to present an abundance of soft elastic modes, which diminish their transport properties, generate heterogeneities in their elastic response, and affect non-linear processes like thermal activation of plasticity. This…
In this paper we develop a probabilistic micro-scale compartmental model and use it to study macro-scale properties of axonal transport, the process by which intracellular cargo is moved in the axons of neurons. By directly modeling the…
Hydrodynamic interactions between fluid-dispersed particles are ubiquitous in soft matter and biological systems and they give rise to intriguing collective phenomena. While it was reported that these interactions can facilitate…
Fluid-resistance limited transport of vesicles through narrow constrictions is a recurring theme in many biological and engineering applications. Inspired by the motor-driven movement of soft membrane-bound vesicles into closed neuronal…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
We study computationally the dynamics of forced, Brownian particles through a disordered system. As the concentration of mobile particles and/or fixed obstacles increase, we characterize the different regimes of flow and address how…