Related papers: Filament attachment dynamics in actin-based propul…
Mycelium bound composites are promising materials for a diverse range of applications including wearables and building elements. Their functionality surpasses some of the capabilities of traditionally passive materials, such as synthetic…
Flight on the two-dimensional air-water interface, with body weight supported by surface tension, is a unique locomotion strategy well adapted for the environmental niche on the surface of water. Although previously described in…
Active force generation by actin-myosin cortex coupled to the cell membrane allows the cell to deform, respond to the environment, and mediate cell motility and division. Several membrane-bound activator proteins move along it and couple to…
Cell motility underlies many biological processes, including cancer metastasis, bacterial infection, and evolutionary adaptation. We introduce a non-equilibrium single-cell motility model inspired by the generalized Langevin equation, which…
Hypothesis: Bacterial contamination of surfaces poses a major threat to public health. Designing effective antibacterial or self-cleaning surfaces requires understanding how bacteria-laden droplets interact with solid substrates and how…
For various cell types and for lamellipodial fragments on flat surfaces, externally induced and spontaneous transitions between symmetric nonmoving states and polarized migration have been observed. This behavior is indicative of…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
We consider an explicit model of a semiflexible filament moving in two dimensions on a gliding assay of motor proteins, which attach to and detach from filament segments stochastically, with a detachment rate that depends on the local load…
Flagellated microorganisms overcome the low-Reynolds-number time reversibility by rotating helical flagella. For peritrichous bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, the randomly distributed flagellar filaments align along the same direction to…
We propose a model for the origin of the isolated nonthermal filaments observed at the Galactic center based on an analogy to cometary plasma tails. We invoke the interaction between a large scale magnetized galactic wind and embedded…
While most chemical bonds weaken under the action of mechanical force (called slip bond behavior), nature has developed bonds that do the opposite: their lifetime increases as force is applied. While such catch bonds have been studied quite…
Actin is a key component of the cytoskeleton, which plays central roles in cell motility, division, growth, and tensile strength. To enable this wide range of transient mechanical processes and properties, networks of actin filaments…
Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random…
Regulation of contraction in striated muscle is controlled by a dual mechanism involving both thin filaments containing actin and thick filaments containing myosin. The thin filament is activated by calcium ions binding to troponin, leading…
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…
Active filaments driven by tangential forces can become trapped in a spinning state when attached to a heavy head, where activity and inertia drive persistent rotation rather than directed transport. Using three-dimensional Langevin…
Mechanical coupling between a cell and substrate relies on focal adhesions, clusters of adhesion proteins linking stress fibers (bundles of actin proteins) inside the cell with surrounding tissue. Focal adhesions have been demonstrated to…
Many of the cell membrane vital functions are achieved by the self-organization of the proteins and biopolymers embedded in it. The protein dynamics are in part determined by its drag. A large number of these proteins can polymerize to form…
We present a novel flow instability that can arise in thin films of cytoskeletal fluids if the friction with the substrate on which the film lies is sufficiently strong. We consider a two dimensional, membrane-bound fragment containing…
Systems of independent active particles embedded into a fluctuating environment are relevant to many areas of soft-matter science. We use a minimal model of noninteracting spin-carrying Brownian particles in a Gaussian field and show that…