Related papers: Model for Polymorphic Transitions in Bacterial Fla…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
We study the dynamics and patterning of polar contractile filaments on the surface of a cylindrical cell using active hydrodynamic equations that incorporate couplings between curvature and filament orientation. Cables and rings…
Recent experimental investigations into Hydra regeneration revealed a remarkable phenomenon: the morphological transformation of a tissue fragment from the incipient spherical configuration to a tube-like structure - the hallmark of a…
We experimentally and theoretically study the dynamics of a low-Reynolds number helical swimmer moving across viscosity gradients. Experimentally, a double-layer viscosity is generated by superposing two miscible fluids with similar…
Bacterial flagellar motor (BFM) is one of the ion-driven molecular machines, which drives the rotation of flagellar filaments and enable bacteria to swim in viscous solutions. Understanding its mechanism is one challenge in biophysics.…
The accumulation of swimming bacteria near surfaces may lead to biological processes such as biofilm formation and wound infection. Previous experimental observations of Vibrio alginolyticus showed an interesting correlation between the…
A small model polypeptide represented in atomic detail is folded using Monte Carlo dynamics. The polypeptide is designed to have a native conformation similar to the central part of the helix-turn-helix protein ROP. Starting from a…
The elastic properties of two-component bilayer membranes are studied using a coarse grain model for amphiphilic molecules. The two species of amphiphiles considered here differ only in their length. Molecular Dynamics simulations are…
In view of the important role helix-sheet transitions play in protein aggregation, we introduce a simple model to study secondary structural transitions of helix-coil-sheet systems using a Potts model starting with an effective Hamiltonian.…
The conformations and dynamics of semiflexible filaments subject to a homogeneous external (gravitational) field, e.g., in a centrifuge, are studied numerically and analytically. The competition between hydrodynamic drag and bending…
Systems with two species of active molecular motors moving on (cytoskeletal) filaments into opposite directions are studied theoretically using driven lattice gas models. The motors can unbind from and rebind to the filaments. Two motors…
Cilia and flagella are essential building blocks for biological fluid transport and locomotion at the micron scale. They often beat in synchrony and may transition between different synchronization modes in the same cell type. Here, we…
We have employed molecular dynamics simulations based on the TIP4P/2005 water model to investigate the local structural, dynamical, and dielectric properties of the two recently reported body-centered-cubic and face-centered-cubic plastic…
We analyze experimentally the shape of a long elastic filament rotating in a viscous liquid. We identify a continuous but sharp transition from a straight to an helical shape, resulting from the competition between viscous stresses and…
In the presence of a finite interlayer displacement field bilayer graphene has an energy gap that is dependent on stacking and largest for the stable AB and BA stacking arrangements. When the relative orientations between layers are twisted…
Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…
Horizontal gene transfer is an important factor in bacterial evolution that can act across species boundaries. Yet, we know little about rate and genomic targets of cross-lineage gene transfer, and about its effects on the recipient…
We theoretically investigate the dynamics of a floating lipid bilayer membrane coupled with a two-dimensional cytoskeleton network, taking into explicitly account the intermonolayer friction, the discrete lattice structure of the…
We investigate an analytically tractable toy model for thermally induced polymorphic dynamics of cooperatively rearranging biofilaments - like microtubules. The proposed 4 -block model, which can be seen as a coarse-grained approximation of…
Networks of filamentous proteins play a crucial role in cell mechanics. These cytoskeletal networks, together with various crosslinking and other associated proteins largely determine the (visco)elastic response of cells. In this letter we…