Related papers: Fluctuations in type IV pilus retraction
We have developed a new extended replica exchange method to study thermodynamics of a system in the presence of external force. Our idea is based on the exchange between different force replicas to accelerate the equilibrium process. We…
DNA helicases are molecular motors that use the energy from ATP hydrolysis to move along DNA, promoting the unwinding or rewinding of the double helix. Here, we use magnetic and optical tweezers to track the motion of three helicases, gp41,…
The run-and-tumble (RT) dynamics followed by bacterial swimmers gives rise first to a ballistic motion due to their persistence, and later, through consecutive tumbles, to a diffusive process. Here we investigate how long it takes for a…
We show that the correlated stochastic fluctuation of the friction coefficient can give rise to long-range directional motion of a particle undergoing Brownian random walk in a constant periodic energy potential landscape. The occurrence of…
Biofilms, bacteria cells surrounded by a self-produced polymeric matrix, are common on medical devices and lead to many hospital infections. The biofilm lifecycle includes disassembly and dispersion, where bacteria clusters detach from the…
We study a generic one-dimensional model for an intracellular cargo driven by N motor proteins against an external applied force. The model includes motor-cargo and motor-motor interactions. The cargo motion is described by an over-damped…
The stability of a flexible fluid membrane containing a distribution of mobile, active proteins (e.g. proton pumps) is shown to depend on the structure and functional asymmetry of the proteins. A stable active membrane is in a…
We investigate the dynamics of a massive tracer particle coupled to an interacting active bath, modeled as a harmonic chain of overdamped active particles analytically, with an aim to understand the impact of bath interactions and activity…
While the characteristics of the driven translocation for asymptotically long polymers are well understood, this is not the case for finite-sized polymers, which are relevant for real-world experiments and simulation studies. Most notably,…
The efficiency at maximum power (EMP) for tight-coupling molecular motors is investigated within the framework of irreversible thermodynamics. It is found that the EMP depends merely on the constitutive relation between the thermodynamic…
We study the dynamics of a single trapped probe surrounded by self-propelled active particles in two dimensions. In the limit of large size separation, we perform an adiabatic elimination of the small active particles to obtain an effective…
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,…
The dynamics of two groups of molecular motors pulling in opposite directions on a rigid filament is studied theoretically. To this end we first consider the behavior of one set of motors pulling in a single direction against an external…
Single-molecule force spectroscopy has opened a new field of research in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Pulling experiments on individual proteins permit us to monitor conformational transitions with high temporal resolution and…
Cells move differently on substrates with different elasticities. In particular, the persistence time of their motion is higher on stiffer substrates. We show that this behavior will result in a net transport of cells directed up a…
F1F0 ATP synthase (ATPase) either facilitates the synthesis of ATP in the mitochondrial membranes and bacterial inner membranes in a process driven by the proton moving force (pmf), or uses the energy from ATP hydrolysis to pump protons…
Flux analysis is a class of constraint-based approaches to the study of biochemical reaction networks: they are based on determining the reaction flux configurations compatible with given stoichiometric and thermodynamic constraints. One of…
Myosin motor proteins drive vigorous steady-state fluctuations in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. Endogenous embedded semiflexible filaments such as microtubules, or added filaments such as single-walled carbon nanotubes are used as novel…
Designing a miniature microscale engine that can override the role of thermal fluctuations has remained elusive and is an important open challenge. Here we provide the design and theoretical framework for a unique information-based engine -…
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…