J
José Alvarado
Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Publications - 32
Citations - 1141
José Alvarado is an academic researcher from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Actin cytoskeleton & Liquid crystal. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 29 publications receiving 942 citations. Previous affiliations of José Alvarado include Fundamental Research on Matter Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics & Leipzig University.
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Journal ArticleDOI
Molecular motors robustly drive active gels to a critically connected state
TL;DR: A study of an actomyosin active gel demonstrates the importance of the crosslinking density of actin polymers in enabling myosin motors to internally drive contraction and rupture the network into clusters.
Journal ArticleDOI
Septins promote F-actin ring formation by crosslinking actin filaments into curved bundles
Manos Mavrakis,Y. Azou-Gros,Fc Tsai,José Alvarado,Aurélie Bertin,Alla Kress,Sophie Brasselet,Gijsje H. Koenderink,Thomas Lecuit +8 more
TL;DR: In vitro reconstitution assays show that septins alone bundle actin filaments into rings, accounting for the defects in actin ring formation in septin mutants, and highlight unique functions of septin in the organization of contractile actomyosin rings.
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Colloidal Liquid Crystals Confined to Synthetic Tactoids.
Ioana C. Gârlea,Oliver J. Dammone,José Alvarado,Valerie Notenboom,Yunfei Jia,Gijsje H. Koenderink,Dirk G. A. L. Aarts,M. Paul Lettinga,M. Paul Lettinga,Bela M. Mulder +9 more
TL;DR: This work studies director fields of filamentous fd-viruses in quasi-2D lens-shaped chambers that mimic the shape of tactoids, the nematic droplets that form during isotropic-nematic phase separation, and finds a number of novel configurations that are metastable, yet long-lived.
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Self-organized patterns of actin filaments in cell-sized confinement
Marina Soares e Silva,José Alvarado,Jeanette Nguyen,Nefeli Georgoulia,Bela M. Mulder,Gijsje H. Koenderink +5 more
TL;DR: It is proposed that bundling is a result of the polydisperse length distribution of the filaments: filaments shorter than the chamber depth introduce an entropic depletion attraction between the longest filaments, which are confined in-plane.
Journal ArticleDOI
Colloidal liquid crystals in rectangular confinement: theory and experiment
Alexander H. Lewis,Ioana Garlea,José Alvarado,Oliver J. Dammone,Peter Howell,Apala Majumdar,Bela M. Mulder,Bela M. Mulder,Minne Paul Lettinga,Gijsje H. Koenderink,Dirk G. A. L. Aarts +10 more
TL;DR: These simulations suggest the existence of higher-energy metastable states with internal defects, and combine analytical expressions with experimentally recorded frequencies of the different equilibrium states to obtain explicit estimates for the extrapolation length of the fd-virus.