Related papers: Branching, Capping, and Severing in Dynamic Actin …

The response of cells during spreading and motility is dictated by several multi-physics events, which are triggered by extracellular cues and occur at different time-scales. For this sake, it is not completely appropriate to provide a cell…

Protrusions at the leading-edge of a cell play an important role in sensing the extracellular cues, during cellular spreading and motility. Recent studies provided indications that these protrusions wrap (coil) around the extra-cellular…

The eukaryotic cell membrane is connected to a dense actin rich cortex. We present FCS and STED experiments showing that dense membrane bound actin networks have severe influence on lipid phase separation. A minimal actin cortex was bound…

Using active gel theory we study theoretically the properties of the cortical actin layer of animal cells. The cortical layer is described as a non-equilibrium wetting film on the cell membrane. The actin density is approximately constant…

Crawling cell motility is vital to many biological processes such as wound healing and the immune response. Using a minimal model we investigate the effects of patterned substrate adhesiveness and biophysical cell parameters on the…

A mean-field kinetic model suggests that the relaxation dynamics of wormlike micellar networks is a long and complex process due to the problem of reducing the number of free end-caps (or dangling ends) while also reaching an equilibrium…

In developing brain, axons and dendrites are capable of connecting to each other with high precision. Recent advances in imaging have allowed for the monitoring of axonal, dendritic, and synapse dynamics in vivo. It is observed that the…

Many models have been developed to study the role of branching actin networks in motility. One important component of those models is the distribution of filament orientations relative to the cell membrane. Two mean-field models previously…

We study time continuous branching processes with exponentially distributed lifetimes, with two types of cells that proliferate according to binary fission. A range of possible system dynamics are considered, each of which is characterized…

The mammalian cell membrane is embedded with biomolecular condensates of protein and lipid clusters, which interact with an underlying viscoelastic cytoskeleton network to organize the cell surface and mechanically interact with the…

Intracellular pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes and Rickettsia rickettsii move within a host cell by polymerizing a comet-tail of actin fibers that ultimately pushes the cell forward. This dense network of cross-linked actin polymers…

Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…

Mathematical models of stem cell differentiation are commonly based upon the concept of subsequent cell fate decisions, each controlled by a gene regulatory network. These networks exhibit a multistable behavior and cause the system to…

We consider a model of fragmentation of sheet by cracks that move with a velocity in preferred direction, but undergo random transverse displacements as they move. There is a non-zero probability of crack-splitting, and the split cracks…

Real networks often grow through the sequential addition of new nodes that connect to older ones in the graph. However, many real systems evolve through the branching of fundamental units, whether those be scientific fields, countries, or…

Material renewability in active living systems, such as in cells and tissues, can drive the large-scale patterning of forces, with distinctive phenotypic consequences. This is especially significant in the cell cytoskeleton, where multiple…

The aim of this paper is to develop suitable models for the phenomenon of cell blebbing, which allow for computational predictions of mechanical effects including the crucial interaction of the cell membrane and the actin cortex. For this…

Proteins fold using a two-state or multi-state kinetic mechanisms, but up to now there isn't a first-principle model to explain this different behaviour. We exploit the network properties of protein structures by introducing novel…

We investigate the convergence of solutions of a recently proposed diffuse interface/phase field model for cell blebbing by means of matched asymptotic expansions. It is a biological phenomenon that increasingly attracts attention by both…

Intrinsically disordered proteins participate in many biological processes by folding upon binding with other proteins. However, coupled folding and binding processes are not well understood from an atomistic point of view. One of the main…