  A long standing puzzle in the rheology of living cells is the origin of the
experimentally observed long time stress relaxation. The mechanics of the cell
is largely dictated by the cytoskeleton, which is a biopolymer network
consisting of transient crosslinkers, allowing for stress relaxation over time.
Moreover, these networks are internally stressed due to the presence of
molecular motors. In this work we propose a theoretical model that uses a
mode-dependent mobility to describe the stress relaxation of such prestressed
transient networks. Our theoretical predictions agree favorably with
experimental data of reconstituted cytoskeletal networks.
