We study a physical model of filaments, crosslinking motors, and static crosslinkers to dissect the microscopic mechanisms of active stress generation in a two-dimensional system of orientationally aligned rods.
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.
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.
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.
Proteins from the kinesin-8 family promote microtubule depolymerization, a process thought to be important for the control of microtubule length in living cells.
Helicases are molecular motors that unwind double-stranded nucleic acids. Here we model a helicase motor that can switch between two states, which could represent two different points in the ATP hydrolysis cycle.
