Related papers: Power laws in microrheology experiments on living …
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
Over the last decades, impressive progresses have been made in many experimental domains, e.g. microscopic techniques such as single-particle tracking, leading to plethoric amounts of data. In a large variety of systems, from natural to…
We present a simple model for the underlying structure of protein-protein pairwise interaction graphs that is based on the way in which proteins attach to each other in experiments such as yeast two-hybrid assays. We show that data on the…
The reporting and evaluation of creep tests of concrete is complicated by the fact that creep is significant even for the shortest observable load durations. Compared to the strain after 0.1 s load duration, the strain at 2 hour duration is…
In the technique of microrheology, macroscopic rheological parameters as well as information about local structure are deduced from the behavior of microscopic probe particles under thermal or active forcing. Microrheology requires…
We present a comparative study on two theoretical descriptions of microrheological experiments. Using a generalized Langevin equation (GLE), we analyze the origin of the power-law behavior of the main properties of a viscoelastic medium.…
We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level…
Mechanical properties of cellular structures, including the cell cytoskeleton, are increasingly used as biomarkers for disease diagnosis and fundamental studies in cell biology. Recent experiments suggest that the cell cytoskeleton and its…
Contraction assay based on surface measurement have been widely used to evaluate cell contractility in 3D models. This method is straightforward and requires no specific equipment, but it does not provide quantitative data about contraction…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
Power law rheology is of widespread occurrence in complex materials that are characterized by the presence of a very broad range of microstructural length and time scales. Although phenomenological models able to reproduce the observed…
Understanding the properties of response time distributions is a long-standing problem in cognitive science. We provide a tutorial overview of several contemporary models that assume power law scaling is a plausible description of the…
Power laws and distributions with heavy tails are common features of many experimentally studied complex systems, like the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and solar flares, or the duration of neuronal avalanches in the brain.…
Eukaryotic cells are mechanically supported by a polymer network called the cytoskeleton, which consumes chemical energy to dynamically remodel its structure. Recent experiments in vivo have revealed that this remodeling occasionally…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
We study the interaction between two cracks propagating quasistatically during the tearing of a thin brittle sheet. We show that the cracks attract each other following a path described by a power law resulting from the competition between…
Polydispersity is a universal feature of synthetic polymers and biological molecules in the cytoplasm. However, its quantitative impact on collective behavior remains poorly understood because conventional metrics, such as the…
We investigate the mechanical interplay between the spatial organization of the actin cytoskeleton and the shape of animal cells adhering on micropillar arrays. Using a combination of analytical work, computer simulations and in vitro…
The mechanics of crawling cells on a substrate is investigated by using a minimal model that satisfies the force-free condition. A cell is described by two subcellular elements connected by a linear actuator that changes the length of the…
Stressed under a constant load, materials creep with a final acceleration of deformation and for any given applied stress and material, the creep failure time can strongly vary. We investigate creep on sheets of paper and confront the…