Nonequilibrium phase transitions, fluctuations and correlations in an active contractile polar fluid

Gowrishankar, Kripa and Rao, Madan (2016) Nonequilibrium phase transitions, fluctuations and correlations in an active contractile polar fluid. Soft Matter, 12 (7). pp. 2040-2046.

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Abstract

A remarkable feature of living cellular systems is that the same ingredients – filaments (actin), motors (myosin) and their regulators, in the presence of ATP – can exhibit an impressive variety of cellular phenotypes.1 To replicate and quantitatively analyze this spectrum of behaviours in controlled simplified systems, much effort has gone into establishing appropriate in vitro reconstituted systems.2–5 The existing in vitro experiments have dealt with either actin motility assays which exhibit predominantly self-propelled behaviour2,3 or systems which are primarily contractile with negligible propulsion.4,5 However in vivo studies6 have demonstrated that the dynamic interaction of cortical actomyosin with the living cell membrane results in features where both contractility and self-propulsion are simultaneously present. These dual features have been successfully recapitulated in recent reconstitution of actomyosin thin films on supported membranes.7 Here we study the nonequilibrium steady states and phase transitions of actively driven collections of filaments-motors in two dimensions using the framework of active hydrodynamics or active gels,8 which could in principle be used to compare with these experiments.6 In addition, we conduct a detailed study of the effect of athermal noise in inducing a variety of nonequilibrium phase transitions and build up spatial correlations in these systems, which can be compared to in vitro experiments

Item Type:	Article
Authors:	Gowrishankar, Kripa and Rao, Madan
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Pattern study, Fluid consisting, Hydrodynamic
Subjects:	Natural Sciences
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Arts and Sciences
Full Text Status:	Restricted
Related URLs:	Google Scholar
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/306
Publisher URL:	DOI: 10.1039/c5sm02527c

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