Related papers: Engines at molecular scales
By converting energy into mechanical work, engines play a central role in most biological and technological processes. In particular, within the current trend towards the development of nanoscience and nanotechnology, microscopic engines…
Information transmission in biological signaling circuits has often been described using the metaphor of a noise filter. Cellular systems need accurate, real-time data about their environmental conditions, but the biochemical reaction…
A distinguishing feature of active particles is the nature of the non-equilibrium noise driving their dynamics. Control of these noise properties is, therefore, of both fundamental and applied interest. We demonstrate emergent tuning of the…
Directed transport of interacting active (self-propelled)Brownian particles is numerically investigated in confined geometries (entropic barriers). The self-propelled velocity can break thermodynamical equilibrium and induce the directed…
We present a theoretical treatment of energy transfer in a molecular motor described in terms of overdamped Brownian motion on a multidimensional tilted periodic potential. The tilt acts as a thermodynamic force driving the system out of…
Manipulating and coupling molecule gears is the first step towards realizing molecular-scale mechanical machines. Here, we theoretically investigate the behavior of such gears using molecular dynamics simulations. Within a nearly rigid-body…
The motility of certain gram-negative bacteria is mediated by retraction of type IV pili surface filaments, which are essential for infectivity. The retraction is powered by a strong molecular motor protein, PilT, producing very high forces…
Biomolecular motors use free energy to drive a variety of cellular tasks, including the transport of cargo, such as vesicles and organelles. We find that the widely-used `constant-force' approximation for the effect of cargo on motor…
Noise is widely understood to be something that interferes with a signal or process. Thus, it is generally thought to be destructive, obscuring signals and interfering with function. However, early in the 20th century, mechanical engineers…
The effect of sequence heterogeneity on polynucleotide translocation across a pore and on simple models of molecular motors such as helicases, DNA polymerase/exonuclease and RNA polymerase is studied in detail. Pore translocation of RNA or…
Traffic-like collective movements are observed at almost all levels of biological systems. Molecular motor proteins like, for example, kinesin and dynein, which are the vehicles of almost all intra-cellular transport in eukayotic cells,…
We have studied the entropy-driven mechanism leading to stationary patterns formation in stochastic systems with local dynamics and non-Fickian diffusion. We have shown that a multiplicative noise fulfilling a fluctuation-dissipation…
After summarizing basic features of self-organization such as entropy export, feedbacks and nonlinear dynamics, we discuss several examples in biology. The main part of the paper is devoted to a model of active Brownian motion that allows a…
We study a one-dimensional mixture of active (run-and-tumble) particles and passive (Brownian) particles, with single-file constraint, in a sawtooth potential. The active particles experience a ratchet effect: this generates a current,…
We demonstrate a Brownian motor, based on cold atoms in optical lattices, where isotropic random fluctuations are rectified in order to induce controlled atomic motion in arbitrary directions. In contrast to earlier demonstrations of…
We consider the barotropic Navier--Stokes system driven by a physically well-motivated transport noise in both continuity as well as momentum equation. We focus on three different situations: (i) the noise is smooth in time and the…
Intracellular transport processes driven by molecular motors can be described by stochastic lattice models of self-driven particles. Here we focus on bidirectional transport models excluding the exchange of particles on the same track. We…
An important challenge in quantum science is to fully understand the efficiency of energy flow in networks. Here we present a simple and intuitive explanation for the intriguing observation that optimally efficient networks are not purely…
We use particle dynamics simulations to probe the correlations between noise and dynamics in a variety of disordered systems, including superconducting vortices, 2D electron liquid crystals, colloids, domain walls, and granular media. The…
We study impact of inertia on directed transport of a Brownian particle under non-equilibrium conditions: the particle moves in a one-dimensional periodic and symmetric potential, is driven by both an unbiased time-periodic force and a…