Related papers: Actin cross-linking organizes basal body patternin…
Intracellular transport of vesicular cargos, organelles, and other macromolecules is an essential process to move large items through a crowded, and inhomogeneous cellular environment. In an effort to dissect the fundamental effects of…
Actin filaments are critical components of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton, playing important roles in a number of cellular functions, such as cell migration, organelle transport, and mechanosensation. They are helical polymers with a…
Actin growth is a fundamental biophysical process and it is, at the same time, a prototypical example of diffusion-mediated surface growth. We formulate a coupled chemo-mechanical, one-dimensional growth model encompassing both material…
Dynamically crosslinked semiflexible biopolymers such as the actin cytoskeleton govern the mechanical behavior of living cells. Semiflexible biopolymers nonlinearly stiffen in response to mechanical loads, whereas the crosslinker dynamics…
We study the effect of the spatial distribution of active force dipoles on the folding pathways and mechanical stability of rigid-elastic networks using Langevin dynamics simulations. While it has been shown in Majumdar et al., J. Chem.…
Oscillatory behaviour in force-generating systems is a pervasive phenomenon in cell biology. In this work, we investigate how oscillations in the actomyosin cytoskeleton drive cell shape changes during the process of Dorsal Closure, a…
We propose a mechanism of cell motility which is based on contraction and does not require protrusion. The contraction driven translocation of a cell is due to internal flow of the cytoskeleton generated by molecular motors. Each motor…
We use optical tweezers microrheology and fluorescence microscopy to apply nonlinear microscale strains to entangled and crosslinked actin networks, and measure the resulting stress and actin filament deformations. We couple nonlinear…
The origin of biological motion can be traced back to the function of molecular motor proteins. Cytoplasmic dynein and kinesin transport organelles within our cells moving along a polymeric filament, the microtubule. The motion of the…
During migration cells exhibit a rich variety of seemingly random migration patterns, which makes unraveling the underlying mechanisms that control cell migration a daunting challenge. For efficient migration cells require a mechanism for…
Based on experimental observations it is known that various biological cells exhibit a persistent random walk during migration on flat substrates. The persistent random walk is characterized by `stop-and-go' movements : unidirectional…
Active Brownian particles (ABPs) are termed out to be a successful way of modeling the moving microorganism on the substrate. In recent studies, it is shown that such organisms can sense the characteristics of the substrate. Motivated by…
Incorporating cells within active biomaterial scaffolds is a promising strategy to develop forefront materials that can autonomously sense, respond, and alter the scaffold in response to environmental cues or internal cell circuitry. Using…
We study the motion of an active Brownian particle (ABP) using overdamped Langevin dynamics on a two-dimensional substrate with periodic array of obstacles and in a quasi-one-dimensional corrugated channel comprised of periodically arrayed…
The plant hormone auxin controls many aspects of the development of plants. One striking dynamical feature is the self-organisation of leaf venation patterns which is driven by high levels of auxin within vein cells. The auxin transport is…
Active networks composed of biopolymers and motor proteins provide versatile biomimetic systems that have advanced active matter physics and deepened our understanding of cytoskeletal dynamics and self-organization under diverse stimuli. In…
It has been supposed that the interplay of elasticity and activity plays a key role in triggering the non-equilibrium behaviors in biological systems. However, the experimental model system is missing to investigate the spatiotemporally…
We study a discrete-time interacting particle system with continuous state space which is motivated by a mathematical model for turnover through branching in actin filament networks. It gives rise to transient clusters reminiscent of actin…
Cells in tissues can organize into a broad spectrum of structures according to their function. Drastic changes of organization, such as epithelial-mesenchymal transitions or the formation of spheroidal aggregates, are often associated…
Bacterial colonies composed of elongated cells form active nematic fluids that spontaneously self-organise into ordered domains of aligned cells and exhibit self-generated chaotic flows powered by cell growth. While their dynamics have…