Related papers: Deformation of crosslinked semiflexible polymer ne…
In active materials, uncoordinated internal stresses lead to emergent long-range flows. An understanding of how the behavior of active materials depends on mesoscopic (hydrodynamic) parameters is developing, but there remains a gap in…
Reconstituted filamentous actin networks with myosin motor proteins form active gels, in which motor proteins generate forces that drive the network far from equilibrium. This motor activity can also strongly affect the network elasticity;…
Analyzing nonlinear conformational relaxation dynamics in elastic networks corresponding to two classical motor proteins, we find that they respond by well-defined internal mechanical motions to various initial deformations and that these…
The formation, maintenance and reorganization of the cytoskeletal filament network is essential for a number of cellular processes. While the crucial role played by active forces generated by motor proteins has been studied extensively,…
We study the mechanics of nematically ordered semiflexible networks showing that they, like isotropic networks, undergo an affine to non-affine cross-over controlled by the ratio of the filament length to the non-affinity length. Deep in…
Cells make use of semi-flexible biopolymers such as actin or intermediate filaments to control their local viscoelastic response by dynamically adjusting the concentration and type of cross-linker molecules. The microstructure of the…
Disordered soft materials, such as fibrous networks in biological contexts exhibit a nonlinear elastic response. We study such nonlinear behavior with a minimal model for networks on lattice geometries with simple Hookian elements with…
The structure of polymer networks, defined by chain lengths and connectivity patterns, fundamentally influences their bulk properties. While existing polymer network models connect chain properties to emergent network behavior, they are…
The network approach became a widely used tool to understand the behaviour of complex systems in the last decade. We start from a short description of structural rigidity theory. A detailed account on the combinatorial rigidity analysis of…
Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…
Biopolymer networks from the intracellular to tissue scale display high rigidity and tensile stress while having coordinations well below the normal threshold for mechanical rigidity. The elastic filaments in these networks are often…
Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…
We examine the equilibrium fluctuation spectrum of a constituent semiflexible filament segment in a network. The effect of this cross linking is to modify the mechanical boundary conditions at the end of the filament. We consider the effect…
Many fibrous materials are modeled as elastic networks featuring a substantial separation between the stiffness scales that characterize different microscopic deformation modes of the network's constituents. This scale separation has been…
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…
The two approaches to analyzing the large strain behavior of rubbery networks are phenomenologically, using strain energy functions drawn from continuum mechanics, and molecular models, which apply statistical mechanics to compute the…
Self organization mechanisms are essential for the cytoskeleton to adapt to the requirements of living cells. They rely on the intricate interplay of cytoskeletal filaments, crosslinking proteins and molecular motors. Here we present an in…
We introduce an individual-based model for fiber elements having the ability to cross-link or unlink each other and to align with each other at the cross links. We first formally derive a kinetic model for the fiber and cross-links…
We study the elasticity of cross-linked networks of thermally fluctuating stiff polymers. As compared to their purely mechanical counterparts, it is shown that these thermal networks have a qualitatively different elastic response. By…
Geometric and structural constraints greatly restrict the selection of folds adapted by protein backbones, and yet, folded proteins show an astounding diversity in functionality. For structure to have any bearing on function, it is thus…