Related papers: Engines at molecular scales
Brownian rotors play an important role in biological systems and in future nano-technological applications. However the mechanisms determining their dynamics, efficiency and performance remain to be characterized. Here the F0 portion of the…
We investigate the transport of superparamagnetic colloidal particles along self-assembled tracks using a periodically applied magnetic field as a model for ratchet-like mechanisms. Through video microscopy and simulations, we examine how…
Molecular motors are macromolecular complexes which use some form of input energy to perform mechanical work. The filamentary tracks, on which these motors move, are made of either proteins (e.g., microtubules) or nucleic acids (DNA or…
We study stochastic particle transport between two reservoirs along a channel, where the particles are pumped against a bias by a traveling wave potential. It is shown that phase transitions of period-averaged densities or currents occur…
Theoretical analysis and fully atomistic molecular dynamics simulations reveal a Brownian ratchet mechanism by which thermal fluctuations drive the net displacement of immiscible liquids confined in channels or pores with micro- or…
Many recent generative models make use of neural networks to transform the probability distribution of a simple low-dimensional noise process into the complex distribution of the data. This raises the question of whether biological networks…
Molecular motors are in charge of almost every process in the life cycle of cells, such as protein synthesis, DNA replication, and cell locomotion, hence being of crucial importance for understanding the cellular dynamics. However, given…
Chemical affinities are responsible for driving active matter systems out of equilibrium. At the nano-scale, molecular machines interact with the surrounding environment and are subjected to external forces. The mechano-chemical coupling…
We study Brownian motors driven by colored non Gaussian noises, both in the overdamped regime and in the case with inertia, and analyze how the departure of the noise distribution from Gaussian behavior can affect its behavior. We analyze…
A hopping model for molecular motors is presented consisting of a state with asymmetric hopping rates with period 2 and a state with uniform hopping rates. State changes lead to a stationary unidirectional current of a particle. The current…
The rectification of noise into directed movement or useful energy is utilized by many different systems. The peculiar nature of the energy source and conceptual differences between such Brownian motor systems makes a characterization of…
We analyze the dynamics of Brownian ratchets in a confined environment. The motion of the particles is described by a Fick-Jakobs kinetic equation in which the presence of boundaries is modeled by means of an entropic potential. The cases…
The transport of molecules in confined media is subject to entropic barriers. So theoretically, asymmetry of the confinement length may lead to molecular ratchets with entropy as the only driving force for the biased transport. We address…
Intracellular transport along microtubules or actin filaments, powered by molecular motors such as kinesins, dyneins or myosins, has been recently modeled using one-dimensional driven lattice gases. We discuss some generalizations of these…
Fluctuations in the abundance of molecules in the living cell may affect its growth and well being. For regulatory molecules (e.g., signaling proteins or transcription factors), fluctuations in their expression can affect the levels of…
The directed transport of Brownian particles requires a system with an asymmetry and with non-equilibrium noise. We here investigate numerically alternative ways of fulfilling these requirements for a two-state Brownian motor, realised with…
The flow of motor proteins on a filamental track is modelled within the the framework of lattice driven diffusive systems. Motors, considered as hopping particles, perform a highly biased asymmetric exclusion process when bound to the…
We consider the transport of rigid objects with internal structure in a flashing ratchet potential by investigating the overdamped behavior of a rod-like chain of evenly spaced point particles. In 1D, analytical arguments show that the…
We show that transport in the presence of entropic barriers exhibits peculiar characteristics which makes it distinctly different from that occurring through energy barriers. The constrained dynamics yields a scaling regime for the particle…
A prerequisite for isolating diseased cells requires a mechanism for effective mass-based separation. This objective, however, is generally rather challenging because typically no valid correlation exists between the size of the particles…