Related papers: Biopolymer Elasticity
The internal dynamics of active gels, both in artificial (in-vitro) model systems and inside the cytoskeleton of living cells, has been extensively studied by experiments of recent years. These dynamics are probed using tracer particles…
We perform simulations to numerically study the writhe distribution of a stiff polymer. We compare with analytic results of Bouchiat and Mezard (PRL 80 1556- (1998); cond-mat/9706050).
This paper focuses on mechanical aspects of chromatin biological functioning. Within a basic geometric modeling of the chromatin assembly, we give for the first time the complete set of elastic constants (twist and bend persistence lengths,…
The dynamic behavior of a partially wetting polymer droplet driven over a nanostructured interface is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider the bead-spring model to represent a polymeric liquid that partially wets a…
We have investigated both experimentally and theoretically the spreading behavior of latex particles deposited on solid substrates. These particles, which are composed of cross-linked polymer chains, have an intrinsic elastic modulus. We…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
Understanding chromatin organization and dynamics is important since they crucially affect DNA functions. In this study, we investigate chromatin dynamics by statistically analyzing single-nucleosome movement in living human cells. Bi-modal…
In this review we focus on the idea of establishing connections between the mechanical properties of DNAligand complexes and the physical chemistry of DNA-ligand interactions. This type of connection is interesting because it opens the…
Here, we provide an overview of theoretical approaches to semiflexible polymers and their networks. Such semiflexible polymers have large bending rigidities that can compete with the entropic tendency of a chain to crumple up into a random…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has emerged as a fundamental mechanism underlying intracellular organization, with evidence for it being reported in numerous different systems. However, there is a growing concern regarding the lack of…
Magnetic tweezers are used to study the mechanical response under torsion of single nucleosome arrays reconstituted on tandem repeats of 5S positioning sequences. Regular arrays are extremely resilient and can reversibly accommodate a large…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the nonlinear elasticity of in vitro networks of the biopolymer actin is dramatically altered in the presence of a flexible cross-linker such as the abundant cytoskeletal protein filamin. The basic…
We predict a diblock copolymer melt in the lamellar phase with added spherical nanoparticles that have an affinity for one block to have a lower tensile modulus than a pure diblock copolymer system. This weakening is due to the swelling of…
To illustrate the power of the biophysical approach in solving important problems in life science, I present here one of our current research projects as an example. We have developed special biophotonic techniques to study the dynamic…
We present an analytical theory for heteropolymer deformation, as exemplified experimentally by stretching of single protein molecules. Using a mean-field replica theory, we determine phase diagrams for stress-induced unfolding of typical…
Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…
Biomaterial systems have allowed for the in vitro production of complex, emergent tissue behaviors that were not possible with conventional 2D culture systems allowing for analysis of the normal development as well as disease processes. We…
Inspired by recent experiments on the dynamics of particles and polymers in artificial cytoskeletons and in cells, we introduce a modified Langevin equation for a particle in an environment that is a viscoelastic medium and that is brought…
Vitrimers are polymer networks that can undergo bond exchange reactions. They dynamically rearrange their structures while maintaining their overall integrity, thus resulting in unique properties such as self-healing, reprocessability,…
Based on modern single molecule techniques, we devise a number of possible experimental setups to probe local properties of DNA such as the presence of DNA-knots, loops or folds, or to obtain information on the DNA-sequence. Similarly, DNA…