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In the cellular phenomena of cytoplasmic streaming, molecular motors carrying cargo along a network of microtubules entrain the surrounding fluid. The piconewton forces produced by individual motors are sufficient to deform long microtubules, as are the collective fluid flows generated by many moving motors. Studies of streaming during oocyte development in the fruit fly $D.~melanogaster$ have shown a transition from a spatially-disordered cytoskeleton, supporting flows with only short-ranged correlations, to an ordered state with a cell-spanning vortical flow. To test the hypothesis that this transition is driven by fluid-structure interactions we study a discrete-filament model and a coarse-grained continuum theory for motors moving on a deformable cytoskeleton, both of which are shown to exhibit a $swirling~instability$ to spontaneous large-scale rotational motion, as observed.
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of embedded m
Following recent X-ray diffraction experiments by Wong, Li, and Safinya on biopolymer gels, we apply Onsager excluded volume theory to a nematic mixture of rigid rods and strong ``$pi/2$ cross-linkers obtaining a long-ranged, highly anisotropic deple
The phase behavior of charged rods in the presence of inter-rod linkers is studied theoretically as a model for the equilibrium behavior underlying the organization of actin filaments by linker proteins in the cytoskeleton. The presence of linkers in
A two-dimensional granular packing under horizontally circular shaking exhibits various collective motion modes depending on the strength of the oscillation and the global packing density. For intermediate packing density and oscillation amplitude, a
Microtubules and motor proteins are building blocks of self-organized subcellular biological structures such as the mitotic spindle and the centrosomal microtubule array. These same ingredients can form new bioactive liquid-crystalline fluids that ar