Murrell Lab

Self-organized criticality can occur in cellular systems, but its origins remain unclear. Now it is shown that cytoskeletal criticality is influenced by the F-actin architecture and myosin active stress. nature.com/articles/s4156…

This piece of work cannot be done without the collaborative efforts with the @GareginPapoian lab at @UMD_CollegePark . We show both in vitro and in silico that actomyosin cortex exhibits criticality which can be tuned via mutual feedback between architecture and active stress.

Our latest paper in Nature Physics shows the actomyosin cortex self-organizes to a critical state via mutual feedback between dynamical F-actin structural remodeling and active stress. This further links cytoskeletal criticality to Anderson Localization. nature.com/articles/s4156…

Congratulations to Dr. Sun🥳! Onto the next chapter.

🎓Congratulations to Dr. Zachary Gao Sun! He earned his PhD in Physics @yalephysics in the @murrell_lab researching mechanics of the cell cytoskeleton.

Congratulations to the Yale Systems Biology Institute’s Michael Murrell, who has received support from @HFSP for an has intercontinental project spanning the US, UK and South Africa to uncover the driving force in cyanobacteria bit.ly/MurrellHFSP

Get your hands into oobleck - a material that feels as hard as a block of cement when you slap its surface, yet is too liquid to hold in your hand! Soft matter physics and Biophysics can be so much fun!

Congratulations to @SunGaoZachary and @melodydibona who were awarded the Physical Cell Biology Student Award and Early Career Award at the @biophysicalsoc meeting today. We’re proud to sponsor both awards and recognize Zachary and Melody’s great work. 🎉

Have you ever heard of the addition of connectivity without the penalty of an increase in rigidity of the network? The work piece of our latest rheological study on in vitro cytoskeletal materials by our PhD student, Zachary Sun, is finally out today!

Check out our latest in vitro actomyosin cortex liposome work by Dr. Ryota Sakamoto! First paper to quantify and characterize the mechanical power and chemical energy consumption during cell division-like processes! On Nature Communications: doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

New Preprint! How can cells polarize in the absence of a stimulus? We suggest a surprising biophysical mechanism, protein caging! We reveal how the complex mechanical interactions at the cell surface lead to symmetry breaking. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

West Campus scientists at the Systems Biology Institute have discovered the thermodynamic principles underpinning energy use in our cells - and a potential pathway to tackle diseases like cancer bit.ly/wave-patterns @murrell_lab @NaturePhysics

Happy new year from LLM! Our latest article on in vitro reconstituted systems: 'Cofilin-mediated actin filament network flexibility facilitates 2D to 3D actomyosin shape change' in EJCB special issue 'In vitro reconstitution of cytoskeletal processes' sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Visualization of f-actin within liposomes during their adhesion, spreading and rupture reveals mechanical interactions of membrane and cytoskeleton can lead to complex cellular assembly in absence of cellular biochemical regulation. @murrell_lab nature.com/articles/s4200…

If you happen to be at the APS March Meeting 2023, please feel free to stop by our talks! #apsmarch @APSMeetings

Very proud of this collaboration with @murrell_lab and the perseverance of the authors through a long and exhausting peer review process.

A long but rigorous and constructive review at @PhysRevX finally resulted in our latest manuscript, where we demonstrate a novel pressure-driven flow of cells out of a cell aggregate.

Yale News covered our recent work on pressure-driven flows in cell aggregates that appeared recently in @PhysRevX. We thank @YaleWestCampus for their support and Jon Atherton for condensing 3 papers into this great story.