相关论文: Binding cooperativity of membrane adhesion recepto…

Animal cells are active, contractile objects. While bioassays address the molecular characterization of cell contractility, the mechanical characterization of the active forces in cells remains challenging. Here by confronting theoretical…

Protein fibril accumulation at interfaces is an important step in many physiological processes and neurodegenerative diseases as well as in designing materials. Here we show, using $\beta$-lactoglobulin fibrils as a model, that semiflexible…

Molecular rotors form twisted conformations upon photoexcitation, with their fluorescent relaxation time serving as a measure of viscosity. They have been used to assess membrane viscosities but yield higher values compared to other…

The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic…

The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…

In biological settings membranes typically interact locally with other membranes or the extracellular matrix in the exterior, as well as with internal cellular structures such as the cytoskeleton. Characterization of the dynamic properties…

We study experimentally and theoretically the equilibrium adhesive contact between a smooth glass lens and a rough rubber surface textured with spherical microasperities with controlled height and spatial distributions. Measurements of the…

When a binary liquid is confined by a strongly repulsive wall, the local density is depleted near the wall and an interface similar to that between the liquid and its vapor is formed. This analogy suggests that the composition of the binary…

In this third and final paper of a series, elastic properties of numerically simulated isotropic packings of spherical beads assembled by different procedures and subjected to a varying confining pressure P are investigated. In addition P,…

Carbohydrates such as the trisaccharide motif LeX are key constituents of cell surfaces. Despite intense research, the interactions between carbohydrates of apposing cells or membranes are not well understood. In this article, we…

We show here that molecular resolution is inherently hybrid in terms of relative separation: If molecules are close to each other, they must be characterized by a fine-grained (geometrically detailed) model, yet if molecules are far from…

Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…

Central to understanding membrane bound cell signaling is to quantify how the membrane ultra-structure consisting of transient spatial domains modulates signaling and how the signaling influences this ultra-structure. Yet, measuring the…

Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…

Surface effects are generally prevailing in confined colloidal systems. Here we report on dispersed nanoparticles close to a fluid membrane. Exact results regarding the static organization are derived for a dilute solution of non-adhesive…

Nanoparticles with multiple ligands have been proposed for use in nanomedicine. The multiple targeting ligands on each nanoparticle can bind to several locations on a cell surface facilitating both drug targeting and uptake. Experiments…

It has been considered that the effective bending rigidity of fluid membranes should be reduced by thermal undulations. However, recent thorough investigation by Pinnow and Helfrich revealed significance of measure factors for the partition…

Transport of molecules across membrane channels is investigated theoretically using exactly solvable discrete stochastic site-binding models. It is shown that the interaction potential between molecules and the channel has a strong effect…

The tensile force along a cylindrical lipid bilayer tube is proportional to the membrane's bending modulus and inversely proportional to the tube radius. We show that this relation, which is experimentally exploited to measure bending…

Cells exhibit qualitatively different behaviors on substrates with different rigidities. The fact that cells are more polarized on the stiffer substrate motivates us to construct a two-dimensional cell with the distribution of focal…