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To produce sounds, we adjust the tension of our vocal folds to shape their properties and control the pitch. This efficient mechanism offers inspiration for designing reconfigurable materials and adaptable soft robots. However,…
Disordered networks of semiflexible filaments are common support structures in biology. Familiar examples include fibrous matrices in blood clots, bacterial biofilms, and essential components of cells and tissues of plants, animals, and…
The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…
Semiflexible polymers are widely used as a paradigm for understanding structural phases in biomolecules including folding of proteins. Here, we compare bead-spring and bead-stick variants of coarse-grained semiflexible polymer models that…
DNA bending on length scales shorter than a persistence length plays an integral role in the translation of genetic information from DNA to cellular function. Quantitative experimental studies of these biological systems have led to a…
Transcriptional regulation of gene expression is one of the main processes that affect cell diversification from a single set of genes. Regulatory proteins often interact with DNA regions located distally from the transcription start sites…
Topological defects are a ubiquitous phenomenon in diverse physical systems. In nematic liquid crystals (LCs), they are dynamic, physicochemically distinct, sensitive to stimuli, and are thereby promising for a range of applications.…
Graphene nanoribbons are the flimsiest material systems in the world, and they get readily distorted. Distortion by twisting, for one, is important because it couples to ribbon's electronic properties. In this Letter, using simulations with…
Detecting conformational transitions in molecular systems is key to understanding biological processes. Here, we investigate the force variance in single-molecule pulling experiments as an indicator of molecular folding transitions. We…
While the behavior of double stranded DNA at mesoscopic scales is fairly well understood, less is known about its relation to the rich mechanical properties in the base-pair scale, which is crucial, for instance, to understand DNA-protein…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Fibrinogen is a protein found in blood that forms Fibrin polymer network to build a clot during wound healing process when there is a cut in the blood vessel. The fibrin fiber is highly stretchable and shows a complex mechanical properties.…
Exact solutions for the elastic and thermodynamic properties for the wormlike chain model are elaborated in terms of Mathieu functions. The smearing of the classical Euler buckling instability for clamped polymers is analyzed for the…
We study the mechanism underlying the attraction between nucleosomes, the fundamental packaging units of DNA inside the chromatin complex. We introduce a simple model of the nucleosome, the eight-tail colloid, consisting of a charged sphere…
A propagating "beam" triggering a local phase transition in a nematic elastomer sets it into a crawling motion, which may morph due to buckling. We consider the motion of the various configurations of slender rods and thin stripes with both…
Essential life processes take place across multiple space and time scales in living organisms but understanding their mechanistic interactions remains an ongoing challenge. Advanced multiscale modeling techniques are providing new…
A methodology for the statistical mechanical analysis of polymeric chains under tension introduced previously is extended to include torque. The response of individual bonds between monomers or of entire groups of monomers to a combination…
In recent past, experiments and simulations have suggested that apart from the solvent friction, friction arising from the protein itself plays an important role in protein folding by affecting the intra-chain loop formation dynamics. This…
A new theoretical survey of proteins' resistance to constant speed stretching is performed for a set of 17 134 proteins as described by a structure-based model. The proteins selected have no gaps in their structure determination and consist…
The buckling and twisting of slender, elastic fibers is a deep and well-studied field. A slender elastic rod that is twisted with respect to a fixed end will spontaneously form a loop, or hockle, to relieve the torsional stress that builds.…