Related papers: Instabilities in the transient response of muscle
We address the well-known limitation of the Huxley and Simmons 1971 (HS) model. It is a statement that at physiological value of stiffness in the actomyosin complex, the distribution of the myosin motors becomes microscopically uniform (all…
Using shear wave elastography, we measure the changes in the wave speed with the stress produced by a striated muscle during isometric voluntary contraction. To isolate the behaviour of an individual muscle from complementary or…
Muscle cells with sarcomeric structure exhibit highly nontrivial passive mechanical response. The difficulty of its continuum modeling is due to the presence of long-range interactions transmitted by extended protein skeleton. To build a…
In this paper, we develop and analyze a minimal model for a 2D network of cross-linked actin filaments and myosin motors, representing the cortical cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. We implement coarse-grained representations of force…
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
Despite the great success of the Huxley sliding filament model proposed half a century ago for actin-myosin linkages (cross-bridges), it fails to explain the force-velocity behavior of stretching skeletal muscles. Huxley's two-state kinetic…
A dynamical model is proposed for isotropic turbulence driven by steady forcing that yields a viscosity independent dynamics for the small-scale (inertial) regime. This reproduces the Kolmogorov spectrum for the two-point velocity…
Randomly disordered (polydomain) liquid crystalline elastomers align under stress. We study the dynamics of stress relaxation before, during and after the Polydomain-Monodomain transition. The results for different materials show the…
We review the physical properties of macromolecular networks, consisting of semiflexible polymers such as actin. We start by giving a theoretical analysis of the conformational statistics and mechanical response of single filaments.…
Tissue cells are in a state of permanent mechanical tension that is maintained mainly by myosin II minifilaments, which are bipolar assemblies of tens of myosin II molecular motors contracting actin networks and bundles. Here we introduce a…
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
Sarcomeres are the basic force generating units of striated muscles and consist of an interdigitating arrangement of actin and myosin filaments. While muscle contraction is usually triggered by neural signals, which eventually set myosin…
Myosin II isoforms with varying mechanochemistry and filament size interact with filamentous actin (F-actin) networks to generate contractile forces in cells. How their properties control force production in environments with varying…
We simulate the nonlocal Stokesian hydrodynamics of an elastic filament which is active due a permanent distribution of stresslets along its contour. A bending instability of an initially straight filament spontaneously breaks flow symmetry…
We address the controversial hot question concerning the validity of the loose coupling versus the lever-arm theories in the actomyosin dynamics by re-interpreting and extending the phenomenological washboard potential model proposed by…
We study a model of an active gel of cross-linked semiflexible filaments with additional active linkers such as myosin II clusters. We show that the coupling of the elasticity of the semiflexible filaments to the mechanical properties of…
Muscle contraction, both in skeletal and cardiac tissue, is driven by sarcomeres, the microscopic units inside muscle cells where thick myosin and thin actin filaments slide past each other. During contraction and relaxation, the…
Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an…
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…
Myosin II is the muscle molecular motor that works in two bipolar arrays in each thick filament of the striated (skeletal and cardiac) muscle, converting the chemical energy into steady force and shortening by cyclic ATP--driven…