6 papers
Pinned Boundaries Delay Contraction and Shape Stress Relaxation in Active Gels
Aniket Marne, James Clarke, Aravind Rao +6
Cells dynamically generate, transmit, and dissipate stress. Central to these processes is the actomyosin cortex, an active contractile material that drives cellular mechanical beha…
Starch granules are instructive scaffolds for synergistic reinforcement and dissipation in hydrogel composites
Shirlaine Juliano, Jasmine Samaniego, Ian M Lillie +3
A fundamental challenge in soft material design is the competition between rigidity and dynamicity, as stiffening mechanisms typically suppress energy dissipation. Here, we demonst…
BARCODE: Biomaterial Activity Readouts to Categorize, Optimize, Design and Engineer for high throughput screening and characterization of dynamically restructuring soft materials
Qiaopeng Chen, Aditya Sriram, Ayan Das +8
Active, responsive, nonequilibrium materials, at the forefront of materials engineering, offer dynamical restructuring, mobility and other complex life-like properties. Yet, this e…
Active and passive crosslinking of cytoskeleton scaffolds tune the effects of cell inclusions on composite structure
Katarina Matic, Nimisha Krishnan, Eric Frank +7
Incorporating cells within active biomaterial scaffolds is a promising strategy to develop forefront materials that can autonomously sense, respond, and alter the scaffold in respo…
Kinesin-driven de-mixing of cytoskeleton composites drives emergent mechanical properties
Janet Sheung, Christopher Gunter, Katarina Matic +5
The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously…
DNA transport is topologically sculpted by active microtubule dynamics
Dylan P. McCuskey, Raisa E. Achiriloaie, Claire Benjamin +6
The transport of macromolecules, such as DNA, through the cytoskeleton is critical to wide-ranging cellular processes from cytoplasmic streaming to transcription. The rigidity and…