Descriptif

This syllabus is based on the last lecture - it may change if a new teacher is appointed.

The functioning of many essential physiological processes such as muscle contraction and cell motility rely primarily on nano-scale mechanisms involving protein interactions. At these scales the effect of the thermal fluctuations cannot be neglected and therefore modelling these processes requires tools from statistical mechanics.

The objective of this course is to present these tools via the modelling of essential components of cell motility.

The course alternates between plenary lectures and numerical lab sessions.

The first two lectures are dedicated to building a minimal model of cell motility. The two next ones focus on introducing the basics of statistical mechanics. Then, these concepts will be applied to the description of cell adhesion, molecular motor contractility, growth of the actin network, etc. Finally, all these elements will be reintroduced in the description of cell motility, and discussed with respect to recent publications.

Final evaluation is based on written report on 2 over 4 numerical lab, and on a report of an article.