相关论文: Ising Models of Cooperativity in Muscle Contractio…

During muscle contraction, myosin motors anchored to thick filaments bind to and slide actin thin filaments. These motors rely on energy derived from ATP, supplied, in part, by diffusion from the sarcoplasm to the interior of the lattice of…

We present a model for the actin contractile ring of adherent animal cells. The model suggests that the actin concentration within the ring and consequently the power that the ring exerts both increase during contraction. We demonstrate the…

Many cytoskeletal systems are now sufficiently well known to permit their precise quantitative modelling. Microtubule and actin filaments are well characterized, and the associated proteins are often known, as well as their abundance and…

Previous models of the cerebrovascular smooth muscle cell have not addressed the interaction between the electrical, chemical and mechanical components of cell function during the development of active tension. These models are primarily…

We construct a homogeneous, nonlinear elastic constitutive law, that models aspects of the mechanical behavior of inhomogeneous fibrin networks. Fibers in such networks buckle when in compression. We model this as a loss of stiffness in…

We study the leading and sub-leading magnetic perturbations of the thermal $E_7$ integrable deformation of the tricritical Ising model. In the low-temperature phase, these magnetic perturbations lead to the confinement of the kinks of the…

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…

Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…

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…

Actin is a filamentary protein which has many remarkable properties making it an ideal system for the study of the dynamics and mechanics of semi-flexible polymer solutions and gels; actin has a persistence length of over 10 microns and can…

At zero temperature, the classical antiferromagnetic Ising model on the pyrochlore lattice is a spin disorder phase of the critical spin correlation. It is a deconfined phase in that the binding energy of the monopole-anti-monopole pair is…

In this paper, we model the mechanics of a collagen pair in the connective tissue extracellular matrix that exists in abundance throughout animals, including the human body. This connective tissue comprises repeated units of two main…

The mechanical properties of actin filaments are essential to their biological functions. Here, we introduce a highly coarse-grained model of actin filaments that preserves helicity and chirality while enabling mesoscale simulations. The…

The ability of cells to move through small spaces depends on the mechanical properties of the cellular cytoskeleton and on nuclear deformability. In mammalian cells, the cytoskeleton is comprised of three interacting, semi-flexible polymer…

Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the signalling of a cluster of receptors. A cooperative model is presented, in which coupling between neighbouring receptor dimers enhances the sensitivity with which stimuli can be detected, without…

Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…

The semiflexible F-actin network of the cytoskeleton is cross-linked by a variety of proteins including filamin, which contain Ig-domains that unfold under applied tension. We examine a simple semiflexible network model cross-linked by such…

Cell polarization relies on long-range cortical flows, which are driven by active stresses and resisted by the cytoskeletal network. While the general mechanisms that contribute to cortical flows are known, a quantitative understanding of…

Interactions between active individuals in animal collectives lead to emergent responses that remain elusive in synthetic soft matter. Here, shape-morphing polymers are used to create bio-inspired transient solids that self-assemble with…

Within living cells, the transport of cargo is accomplished by groups of molecular motors. Such collective transport could utilize mechanisms which emerge from inter-motor interactions in ways that are yet to be fully understood. Here we…