Related papers: Mechanochemical action of the dynamin protein
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
A common mechanism for intracellular transport is the use of controlled deformations of the membrane to create spherical or tubular buds. While the basic physical properties of homogeneous membranes are relatively well-known, the effects of…
Cellular membranes are elastic lipid bilayers that contain a variety of proteins, including ion channels, receptors, and scaffolding proteins. These proteins are known to diffuse in the plane of the membrane and to influence the bending of…
Microtubule dynamic instability arises from the hydrolysis of GTP bound to the beta-monomer of the tubulin dimer. The conformational change induced by hydrolysis is unknown, but microtubules disassemble into protofilaments of GDP-bound…
Biological membranes are known to form various structural motifs, from lipid bilayers to tubular filaments and networks facilitating e.g. adhesion and cell-cell communication. To understand the biophysical processes underpinning lipid-lipid…
The assembly of proteins in membranes plays a key role in many crucial cellular pathways. Despite their importance, characterizing transmembrane assembly remains challenging for experiments and simulations. Equilibrium molecular dynamics…
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
The biological function of membranes is closely related to their softness, which is often studied through the membranes' thermally-driven fluctuations. The analysis commonly assumes that the relaxation rate of a pure bending deformation is…
Recent structural findings have shown that dynamin, a cytosol protein playing a key-role in clathrin-mediated endocytosis, inserts partly within the lipid bilayer and tends to self-assemble around lipid tubules. Taking into account these…
Membrane tubulation is a ubiquitous process that occurs both at the plasma membrane and on the membranes of intracellular organelles. These tubulation events are known to be mediated by forces applied on the membrane either due to motor…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
We present a continuum model trained on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for cellular membranes composed of an arbitrary number of lipid types. The model is constructed within the formalism of dynamic density functional theory and can be…
We study the dynamic structure of lipid domain inclusions embedded within a phase-separated reconstituted lipid bilayer in contact with a swarming flow of gliding filamentous actin. Passive circular domains transition into highly-deformed…
Membrane pores are implicated in several critical functions, including cell fusion and the transport of signaling molecules for intercellular communication. However, these structural features are often difficult to probe directly. Droplet…
Fluid membranes made out of lipid bilayers are the fundamental separation structure in eukaryotic cells. Many physiological processes rely on dramatic shape and topological changes (e.g. fusion, fission) of fluid membrane systems. Fluidity…
Viscosity is a key property of cell membranes that controls mobility of embedded proteins and membrane remodeling. Measuring it is challenging because existing approaches involve complex experimental designs and/or models, and the…
Lipid bilayers forming biological membranes are known to behave as viscous 2D fluids on submicrometer scales; usually they contain a large number of active protein inclusions. Recently, it has been shown [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 112,…
Guanylate binding proteins (GBPs) are soluble dynamin-like proteins with structured domains that undergo a conformational transition for GTP-controlled oligomerization to exert their function as part of the innate immune system of mammalian…
Living cells employ excitable reaction-diffusion waves for internal cellular functions, in which curvature-inducing proteins are often involved. However, the role of their mechanochemical coupling is not well understood. Here, we report the…