Related papers: Nonlinear Elasticity in Biological Gels
Space-saving design is a requirement that is encountered in biological systems and the development of modern technological devices alike. Many living organisms dynamically pack their polymer chains, filaments or membranes inside of…
Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…
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…
Exploiting the "natural" frame of space curves, we formulate an intrinsic dynamics of twisted elastic filaments in viscous fluids. A pair of coupled nonlinear equations describing the temporal evolution of the filament's complex curvature…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
The mechanics of complex soft matter often cannot be understood in the classical physical frame of flexible polymers or rigid rods. The underlying constituents are semiflexible polymers, whose finite bending stiffness ($\kappa$) leads to…
The paper develops the stiffness relationship between the movements and forces among a system of discrete interacting grains. The approach is similar to that used in structural analysis, but the stiffness matrix of granular material is…
Natural and synthetic multi-component gels display emergent properties, which implies that they are more than just the sum of their components. This warrants the investigation of the role played by inter-species interactions in shaping gel…
We construct a homogeneous, nonlinear elastic constitutive law, that models aspects of the mechanical behavior of inhomogeneous fibrin networks. Fibers in such networks buckle when in compression. We model this as a loss of stiffness in…
Protein structures in nature often exhibit a high degree of regularity (secondary structures, tertiary symmetries, etc.) absent in random compact conformations. We demonstrate in a simple lattice model of protein folding that structural…
A large variety of materials, widely encountered both in engineering applications and in the biological realm, are characterised by a non-vanishing internal stress distribution, even in the absence of external deformations or applied…
This paper presents a theory for the behaviour of isotropic-hardening/softening elastoplastic materials that do not have a preferred reference configuration. In spite of important differences, many ingredients of classical plasticity are…
We present a theoretical framework for the linear and nonlinear visco-elastic properties of reversibly crosslinked networks of semiflexible polymers. In contrast to affine models where network strain couples to the polymer end-to-end…
Experiments have shown that elasticity of disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks is very different from networks with rigid crosslinks. Here, we model and analyze filamentous networks as a collection of randomly oriented…
The modeling of the elastic properties of disordered or nanoscale solids requires the foundations of the theory of elasticity to be revisited, as one explores scales at which this theory may no longer hold. The only cases for which…
Semiflexible polymers form central structures in biological material. Modeling approaches usually neglect influences of polymer-specific molecular features aiming to describe semiflexible polymers universally. Here, we investigate the…
Biological processes, from morphogenesis to tumor invasion, spontaneously generate shear stresses inside living tissue. The mechanisms that govern the transmission of mechanical forces in epithelia and the collective response of the tissue…
Architected materials achieve unique mechanical properties through precisely engineered microstructures that minimize material usage. However, a key challenge of low-density materials is balancing high stiffness with stable deformability up…