ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Spontaneous symmetry breaking in active droplets provides a generic route to motility.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bacterial turbulence drives interfacial waves and shape dynamics in phase-separated droplets.Nature communications · 2026Article
- What is active wetting?The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2026Review
- Morphodynamics of surface-attached active drops.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Topology controls flow patterns in active double emulsions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Asymmetric fluctuations and self-folding of active interfaces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Mesenchymal cell migration on one-dimensional micropatterns.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2024Review
- Spontaneous motion of a passive fluid droplet in an active microchannel.Soft matter · 2023Article
- On multistability and constitutive relations of cell motion on fibronectin lanes.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- The crucial role of adhesion in the transmigration of active droplets through interstitial orifices.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The nonlinear motion of cells subject to external forces.Soft matter · 2022Article
- Deformable active nematic particles and emerging edge currents in circular confinements.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2022Article
- Stochastic Hydrodynamics of Complex Fluids: Discretisation and Entropy Production.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Self-organization in amoeboid motility.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Review
- Vesicle shape transformations driven by confined active filaments.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Flow coupling between active and passive fluids across water-oil interfaces.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The vortex-driven dynamics of droplets within droplets.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Stick-slip model for actin-driven cell protrusions, cell polarization, and crawling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Soft channel formation and symmetry breaking in exotic active emulsions.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Effective interactions mediated between two permeable disks in an active fluid.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
We explore a generic mechanism whereby a droplet of active matter acquires motility by the spontaneous breakdown of a discrete symmetry. The model we study offers a simple representation of a "cell extract" comprising, e.g., a droplet of actomyosin solution. (Such extracts are used experimentally to model the cytoskeleton). Actomyosin is an active gel whose polarity describes the mean sense of alignment of actin fibres. In the absence of polymerization and depolymerization processes ('treadmilling'), the gel's dynamics arises solely from the contractile motion of myosin motors; this should be unchanged when polarity is inverted. Our results suggest that motility can arise in the absence of treadmilling, by spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of polarity inversion symmetry. Adapting our model to wall-bound cells in two dimensions, we find that as wall friction is reduced, treadmilling-induced motility falls but SSB-mediated motility rises. The latter might therefore be crucial in three dimensions where frictional forces are likely to be modest. At a supracellular level, the same generic mechanism can impart motility to aggregates of nonmotile but active bacteria; we show that SSB in this (extensile) case leads generically to rotational as well as translational motion.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.