In mixtures of cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors, local sliding motions can lead to large-scale collective motions. How do we integrate molecular-level knowledge to predict higher-order aspects of assembly and organization in these systems?
For a living cell to divide successfully, each daughter cell must inherit the correct genetic material. We are working to understanding how the microtubule-based mitotic spindle organizes and moves chromosomes.
During cell division, mitotic spindles segregate duplicated chromosomes with high fidelity. Interactions between microtubules, motor proteins, and crosslinkers organize the spindle into a bipolar array, but how spindle bipolarity is established is not fully understood.
Biological filaments can serve as one-dimensional tracks on which motor proteins move. Asymmetric simple exclusion process models that have been applied to diverse examples of one-dimensional nonequilibrium transport.
