Regensburg 2013 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SYSD: Symposium SKM Dissertation-Prize 2013

SYSD 1: SKM Dissertation-Prize 2013

SYSD 1.3: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 11. März 2013, 12:20–12:45, H2

Structure Formation in Reconstituted Active Systems — •Volker Schaller¹, Christoph Weber², Erwin Frey², and Andreas R. Bausch¹ — ¹E27, Technische Universität München — ²ASC and CeNS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München

The emergence of collective motion is a fascinating phenomenon. Prime examples are the flocking motion of birds and collective motion patterns in bacterial colonies. Numerous theoretical studies have been devoted to elucidate this complex self-organization process. Despite these models are able to qualitatively reproduce many of the phenomena observed in nature, a detailed verification of the theoretic predictions is still hampered by the lack of well-defined and controllable experimental systems. To close this gap, we introduce a set of reconstituted model systems that allow for a quantitative comparison between theory and experiment. The experimental systems are based on biological proteins: actin filaments, molecular motors, and crosslinking proteins.

With these setups we show that filaments that are propelled by motor proteins, above a critical density, self-organize to form collectively moving polar structures. This ordered phase is characterized by persistent density modulations and the dynamic propagation of topological defects. Besides, the ordered phase has remarkable statistical properties like the occurrence of abnormally large fluctuations in the particle density. All these phenomena were theoretically predicted but not experimentally verified so far. Finally we show that the large-scale structure formation in cytoskeletal systems sensitively depends on the microscopic properties of the crosslinker.