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A growing amount of evidence points to the fact that many enzymes exhibit fluctuations in their catalytic activity, which are associated with conformational changes on a broad range of timescales. The experimental study of this phenomenon,…
Droplet microfluidics, in which micro-droplets serve as individual reactors, has enabled a wide range of high-throughput biochemical processes. Unlike solid wells typically used in current biochemical assays, droplets are subject to…
Recent advancements in the ability to construct three-dimensional (3D) tissues and organoids from stem cells and biomaterials have not only opened abundant new research avenues in disease modeling and regenerative medicine but also have…
Motivated by the fine compositional control observed in membraneless droplet organelles in cells, we investigate how a sharp binding-unbinding transition can occur between multivalent client molecules and receptors embedded in a porous…
The reaction-diffusion master equation is a stochastic model often utilized in the study of biochemical reaction networks in living cells. It is applied when the spatial distribution of molecules is important to the dynamics of the system.…
Nanoparticles (NPs) demonstrate considerable potential in medical applications, including targeted drug delivery and diagnostic probes. However, their efficacy depends on their ability to navigate through the complex biological environments…
Diffusiophoresis, a ubiquitous phenomenon that induces particle transport whenever solute concentration gradients are present, was recently observed in the context of microsystems and shown to strongly impact colloidal transport (patterning…
Many mathematical models for biological phenomena, such as the spread of diseases, are based on reaction-diffusion equations for densities of interacting cell populations. We present a consistent derivation of reaction-diffusion equations…
Metabolic pathways describe chains of enzymatic reactions. Their modelling is a key point to understand living systems. An enzymatic reaction is an interaction between one or several metabolites (substrates) and an enzyme (simple protein or…
Recent experiments have revealed that cytoplasms become glassy when their metabolism is suppressed, while they maintain fluidity in a living state. The mechanism of this active fluidization is not clear, especially for bacterial cytoplasms,…
We discuss the diffusion phenomenon in the parabolic and hyperbolic regimes. New effects related to the finite velocity of the diffusion process are predicted, that can partially explain the strange behavior associated to adsorption…
Living cells are characterized by the micrometric confinement of various macromolecules at high concentrations. Using droplets containing binary polymer blends as artificial cells, we previously showed that cell-sized confinement causes…
The reaction-diffusion models have been extensively applied to explain the mechanism of pattern formations in early embryogenesis based on geometrically confined microtissues consisting of human pluripotent stem cells. Recently, mechanical…
Stochastic models of reaction-diffusion systems are important for the study of biochemical reaction networks where species are present in low copy numbers or if reactions are highly diffusion limited. In living cells many such systems…
Transport through nano-channels plays an important role in many biological processes and industrial applications. Gaining insights into the functioning of biological transport processes and the design of man-made nano-devices requires an…
Reaction-diffusion processes in two-dimensional percolating structures are investigated. Two different problems are addressed: reaction spreading on a percolating cluster and front propagation through a percolating channel. For reaction…
Cell membranes are out of thermodynamic equilibrium notably because of membrane recycling, i.e. active exchange of material with the cytosol. We propose an analytically tractable model of biomembrane predicting the effects of recycling on…
By means of molecular dynamics simulations we investigate the formation of single-chain nanoparticles through intramolecular cross-linking of polymer chains, in the presence of their precursors acting as purely steric crowders in…
Transcription factor (TF) molecules translocate by facilitated diffusion (a combination of 3D diffusion around and 1D random walk on the DNA). Despite the attention this mechanism received in the last 40 years, only a few studies…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…