Robert Blackwell's paper "Microscopic origins of anisotropic active stress in motor-driven nematic liquid crystals" was published online in Soft Matter.
Non-equilibrium active matter made up of self-driven particles with short-range repulsive interactions exhibits collective motion and nonequilibrium order-disorder transitions.
Biopolymers serve as one-dimensional tracks on which motor proteins move. These phenomena have inspired theoretical models of one-dimensional transport, crowding, and jamming.
Meredith Betterton was awarded a National Science Foundation grant DMR 1551095, "EAGER: Biophysical theory of mitotic spindle length instability and self assembly."
Microtubules and motor proteins can form new “bioactive” liquid-crystalline fluids that are intrinsically out of equilibrium and which display complex flows and defect dynamics.
Robert Blackwell's paper (with Tony Gao) "Multiscale polar theory of microtubule and motor-protein assemblies" was published in Physical Review Letters .
When chromosomes are being separated in preparation for cell division, their motions are slow relative to the speed at which many motor enzymes can move their cellular cargoes and at which microtubules depolymerize.
Regulating physical size is an essential problem that biological organisms must solve, but it is not well understood what physical principles and mechanisms organisms use to sense and regulate their size.
Many soft-matter and biophysical systems are composed of monomers that reversibly assemble into rod-like aggregates that can then order into liquid-crystal phases.