Related papers: Actin Polymerization Kinetics, Cap Structure and F…
We develop a formalism to describe the equilibrium distributions for segments of confined branched networks consisting of stiff filaments. This is applicable to certain situations of cytoskeleton in cells, such as for example actin…
The crawling motility of many eukaryotic cells is driven by filamentous actin (F-actin), and regulated by a network of signaling proteins and lipids (including small GTPases). The tangle of positive and negative feedback loops gives rise to…
Chromatin fibers composed of DNA and proteins fold into consecutive loops to form rod-shaped chromosome in mitosis. Although the loop growth dynamics is investigated in several studies, its detailed processes are unclear. Here, we describe…
A class of nucleosome remodeling motors translocate nucleosomes, to which they are attached, toward the middle of DNA chain in the presence of ATP during in vitro experiments. Such a biological activity is likely based on a physical…
Hydra, a centimeter long cylindrical-shaped freshwater organism, has emerged as an interesting model system for studying morphogenesis in animals. Recently, fluorescent imaging of cytoskeletal actin filaments on the outer surface of hydra…
The morphological dynamics, instabilities and transitions of elastic filaments in viscous flows underlie a wealth of biophysical processes from flagellar propulsion to intracellular streaming, and are also key to deciphering the rheological…
We investigate dynamical coupling between water and amino acid side-chain residues in solvation dynamics by selecting residues often used as natural probes, namely tryptophan, tyrosine and histidine, located at different positions on…
Active nematics are microscopically driven liquid crystals that exhibit dynamical steady states characterized by the creation and annihilation of topological defects. Motivated by experimental realizations of such systems made of biopolymer…
Cells and tissues have the remarkable ability to actively generate the forces required to change their shape. This active mechanical behavior is largely mediated by the actin cytoskeleton, a crosslinked network of actin filaments that is…
We consider a driven tracer particle (TP) in a bath of hard-core particles undergoing continuous exchanges with a reservoir. We develop an analytical framework which allows us to go beyond the standard force-velocity relation used for this…
Growth-fragmentation processes describe the evolution of systems of cells which grow continuously and fragment suddenly; they are used in models of cell division and protein polymerisation. Typically, we may expect that in the long run, the…
The biopolymers actin and microtubules are often in an ongoing assembling/disassembling state far from thermal equilibrium. Above a critical density this leads to spatially periodic patterns, as shown by a scaling argument and in terms of a…
The synthetic actin network demands great interest as bio-material due to its soft and wet nature that mimic many biological scaffolding structures. The study of these structures can contribute to a better understanding of this new…
Actin cables are linear cytoskeletal structures that serve as tracks for myosin-based intracellular transport of vesicles and organelles in both yeast and mammalian cells. In a yeast cell undergoing budding, cables are in constant dynamic…
Protein assembly plays an important role throughout all phyla of life, both physiologically and pathologically. In particular, aggregation and polymerization of proteins are key-strategies that regulate cellular function. In recent years,…
The dynamic structure factor of semiflexible polymers in solution is derived from the wormlike chain model. Special attention is paid to the rigid constraint of an inextensible contour and to the hydrodynamic interactions. For the cases of…
A coarse-grained computational model is used to investigate the effect of a fluctuating fluid membrane on the dynamics of patchy-particle assembly into virus capsid-like cores. Results from simulations for a broad range of parameters are…
While a significant body of investigations have been focused on the process of protein self-assembly, much less is understood about the reverse process of a filament breaking due to thermal motion into smaller fragments, or depolymerization…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…
Living cells move thanks to assemblies of actin filaments and myosin motors that range from very organized striated muscle tissue to disordered intracellular bundles. The mechanisms powering these disordered structures are debated, and all…