This is an overview of theoretical approaches to semiflexible polymers and their networks.
Such semiflexible polymers have large bending rigidities that can compete with the entropic …

Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce
broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed …

Quantum metrology provides a route to overcome practical limits in sensing devices. It holds
particular relevance to biology, where sensitivity and resolution constraints restrict …

A ubiquitous observation in cell biology is that the diffusive motion of macromolecules and
organelles is anomalous, and a description simply based on the conventional diffusion …

Living cells are viscoelastic materials, dominated by an elastic response on timescales
longer than a millisecond. On shorter timescales, the dynamics of individual cytoskeleton …

Cells both actively generate and sensitively react to forces through their mechanical
framework, the cytoskeleton, which is a nonequilibrium composite material including …

In microrheology, the local and bulk mechanical properties of a complex fluid are extracted
from the motion of probe particles embedded within it. In passive microrheology, particles …

Research on soft materials, including colloidal suspensions, glasses, pastes, emulsions,
foams, polymer networks, liquid crystals, granular materials, and cells, has captured the …

To elucidate the dynamic and functional role of a cell within the tissue it belongs to, it is
essential to understand its material properties. The cell is a viscoelastic material with highly …

We study intact and bulging Escherichia coli cells using atomic force microscopy to separate
the contributions of the cell wall and turgor pressure to the overall cell stiffness. We find …