Towards a predictive theory for cytoskeletal Networks

Much of our current understanding of the physics of the cytoskeleton - the structure that allows cells to change and maintain their shapes, and to move - comes from phenomenological theories that capture its behavior in terms of a few material properties such as viscosities elasticities and active stresses. How these properties are set by microscale processes is often less well understood. We seek to bridge this gap by deriving a theory for the large length and time scale physics of cytoskeletal materials based on microscopic interaction rules that can be measured in the lab.