相关论文: A generic self-stabilization mechanism for biomole…
We propose a simple phenomenological model for describing the conformational dynamics of biopolymers via the nonlinearity-induced buckling and collapse (i.e. coiling up) instabilities. Taking into account the coupling between the internal…
It is known that mechanical interactions couple a cell to its neighbors, enabling a feedback loop to regulate tissue growth. However, the interplay between cell-cell adhesion strength, local cell density and force fluctuations in regulating…
In nanoparticle haloing, charged nanoparticles have been found to enhance the stability of colloidal suspensions by forming a non-adsorbing layer surrounding neutral colloids which induces an electrostatic repulsion between them. However,…
Within cells, vesicles and proteins are actively transported several micrometers along the cytoskeletal filaments. The transport along microtubules is propelled by dynein and kinesin motors, which carry the cargo in opposite directions.…
Multisite phosphorylation plays an important role in intracellular signaling. There has been much recent work aimed at understanding the dynamics of such systems when the phosphorylation/dephosphorylation mechanism is distributive, that is,…
Migration of animal cells is based on the interplay between actin polymerization at the front, adhesion along the cell-substrate interface, and actomyosin contractility at the back. Active gel theory has been used before to demonstrate that…
Nascent adhesions are submicron transient structures promoting the early adhesion of cells to the extracellular matrix. Nascent adhesions typically consist of several tens of integrins, and serve as platforms for the recruitment and…
The mechanical environment of a substrate plays a key role in influencing the behavior of adherent biological cells. Traditional tunable substrates have limitations as their mechanical properties cannot be dynamically altered in-situ during…
The one-dimensional crawling movement of a cell is considered in this theoretical study. Our active gel model shows that for a cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, as myosin contractility increases, a cell starts to move at…
Observations of single epidermal cells on flat adhesive substrates have revealed two distinct morphological and functional states, namely a non-migrating symmetric unpolarized state and a migrating asymmetric polarized state. These states…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…
Generation of mechanical oscillation is ubiquitous to wide variety of intracellular processes. We show that catchbonding behaviour of motor proteins provides a generic mechanism of generating spontaneous oscillations in motor-cytoskeletal…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
In biological materials, strong binding despite an applied load force is often based on clusters of dynamic bonds that share the load. Different macroscopic behaviors have been described depending on whether the load is shared locally or…
Self-consistent theory of electron localization in disordered systems is generalized for the case of interacting electrons. We propose and critically compare a number of possible self-consistency schemes which take into account the lowest…
Active colloids constitute a novel class of materials composed of colloidal-scale particles locally converting chemical energy into motility, mimicking micro-organisms. Evolving far from equilibrium, these systems display structural…
We study a system of self-propelled disks that perform run-and-tumble motion, where particles can adopt more than one internal state. One of those internal states can be transmitted to another particle if the particle carrying this state…
A suspension of swimming microorganisms often generates a large-scale convective pattern known as bioconvection. In contrast to the thermal Rayleigh-Benard system, recent experimental studies report an emergence of steady localized…
Contractility in animal cells is often generated by molecular motors such as myosin, which require polar substrates for their function. Motivated by recent experimental evidence of motor-independent contractility, we propose a robust…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…