生物物理
We discuss a theoretical model for bidirectional cargo transport in biological cells, which is driven by teams of molecular motors and subject to thermal fluctuations. The model describes explicitly the directed motion of the molecular…
Many different types of cellular cargos are transported bidirectionally along microtubules by teams of molecular motors. The motion of this cargo-motors system has been experimentally characterized in vivo as processive with rather…
Inside cells, various cargos are transported by teams of molecular motors. Intriguingly, the motors involved generally have opposite pulling directions, and the resulting cargo dynamics is a biased stochastic motion. It is an open question…
The lifetimes of non-covalent A:a knob-hole bonds in fibrin probed with the optical trap-based force-clamp first increases ("catch bonds") and then decreases ("slip bonds") with increasing tensile force. Molecular modeling of…
Viscoelasticity and related phenomena are of great importance in the study of mechanical properties of material especially, biological materials. Certain materials show some complex effects in mechanical tests, which cannot be described by…
Birds have a remarkable ability to obtain navigational information from the Earth's magnetic field. The primary detection mechanism of this compass sense is uncertain but appears to involve the quantum spin dynamics of radical pairs formed…
Photosynthetic organisms rely on a series of self-assembled nanostructures with tuned electronic energy levels in order to transport energy from where it is collected by photon absorption, to reaction centers where the energy is used to…
How cells move through the three-dimensional extracellular matrix (ECM) is of increasing interest in attempts to understand important biological processes such as cancer metastasis. Just as in motion on flat surfaces, it is expected that…
We provide a prototypical description of mechanically-induced collective conformational change (folding), relevant in a variety of biological contexts from muscle contraction to hair cell gating and integrin binding. Our study is inspired…
Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an…
Small non-coding RNAs can exert significant regulatory activity on gene expression in bacteria. In recent years, substantial progress has been made in understanding bacterial gene expression by sRNAs. However, recent findings that…
Vertex models represent confluent tissue by polygonal or polyhedral tilings of space, with the individual cell interacting via force laws that depend on both the geometry of the cells and the topology of the tessellation. This dependence on…
We derive a fully covariant theory of the mechanics of active surfaces. This theory provides a framework for the study of active biological or chemical processes at surfaces, such as the cell cortex, the mechanics of epithelial tissues, or…
We study a simple micro-mechanical device that does not lose its snap-through behavior in an environment dominated by fluctuations. The main idea is to have several degrees of freedom that can cooperatively resist the de-synchronizing…
Motivated by experimentally observed biocompatibility enhancement of nanoengineered cubic zirconia ZrO2 coatings to mesenchymal stromal cells, we have carried out computational analysis of the initial immobilization of one of known…
In the first part of this paper we review a mathematical model for the onset and progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD) that was developed in subsequent steps over several years. The model is meant to describe the evolution of AD in vivo.…
We describe a simple and consistent quantum mathematical model that simulates the possible role of quantum interference and sink effects in the nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ) in light-harvesting complexes (LHCs). Our model consists of a…
We study theoretically the noise-assisted quantum exciton (electron) transfer (ET) in bio-complexes consisting of a single-level electron donor and an acceptor which has a complicated internal structure, and is modeled by many electron…
Experiments were performed to test the effect of an electric field on growing E-coli cultures. Cell growing dishes were fitted with platinum wires to create a potential drop across the dish. Water diluted E-coli cultures were brushed across…
Swarming of animal groups enthralls scientists in fields ranging from biology to physics to engineering. Complex swarming patterns often arise from simple interactions between individuals to the benefit of the collective whole. The…