Event Archive

Michael J. Shelley - Flows and instabilities in cellular biomechanics

Wednesday, June 15, 2022 at 10:45am - 11:45am

Michael J. Shelley - NYU

Wednesday, June 15, 10:45AM (Zoom meeting starts at 10:30)

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“Flows and instabilities in cellular biomechanics”

Flows in the fluidic interior of living cells can serve function, and by their structure shed light on how forces are exerted within the cell. Some of these flows can arise through novel collective instabilities of the cytoskeleton, the set of polymers, cross-linkers, and molecular motors that underlie much of the mechanics within and between cells.

I'll discuss experiments, mathematical modeling and analysis, and simulations of two such cases. One is understanding the emergence of
cell-spanning vortical flows in developing egg cells and driven by cargo-bearing molecular motors, while the other arises from studying the nature of force transduction in the dynamics of microtubule arrays inside of synthetic cells. Both show the importance of polymer density in determining dynamics and time-scales, and have required the development of new coarse-grained models and simulation methods.