Related papers: Physical Properties of Biological Membranes
The elastic properties of a self-assembled bilayer membrane are studied using the self-consistent field theory, applied to a model system composed of flexible amphiphilic chains dissolved in hydrophilic polymeric solvents. Examining the…
Cell-cell contacts in tissues are continuously subject to mechanical forces due to homeostatic pressure and active cytoskeleton dynamics. While much is known about the molecular pathways of adhesion, the role of mechanics is less well…
Vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers exhibit a wide diversity of behavior upon electroporation, due to competitions between edge, surface and bending energies that drive the system, while different viscous dissipation…
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…
Lateral organization in the plane of the plasma membrane is an important driver of biological processes. The past dozen years have seen increasing experimental support for the notion that lipid organization plays an important role in…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…
Computer simulations of coarse-grained molecular models for amphiphilic systems can provide insight into the the structure of amphiphiles at interfaces. They can help to identify the factors that determine the phase behavior, and they can…
Biomembranes consisting of two opposing phospholipid monolayers, which comprise the so-called lipid bilayer, are largely responsible for the dual solid-fluid behavior of individual cells and viruses. Quantifying the mechanical…
We show that the formation of membrane tubes (or membrane tethers), which is a crucial step in many biological processes, is highly non-trivial and involves first order shape transitions. The force exerted by an emerging tube is a…
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…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
We present a recent theory for nerve pulse propagation and anesthesia and argue that both nerve activity and the action of anesthetics can be understood on the basis of simple physical laws. It was found experimentally that biological…
We introduce a simulation strategy to consistently couple continuum biomembrane dynamics to the motion of discrete biological macromolecules residing within or on the membrane. The methodology is used to study the diffusion of integral…
Nature uses elongated shapes and filaments to build stable structures, generate motion, and allow complex geometric interactions. In this Review, we examine the role of biological filaments across different length scales. From the molecular…
The melanin is a group of biological pigments commonly found in living beings, it can be classified in three groups: eumelanin human beings, pheomelanins in animals, and allomelanins in the vegetal kingdom. There is a special interest in…
The thermodynamic (TD) properties of biological membranes play a central role for living systems. It has been suggested, for instance, that nonlinear pulses such as action potentials (APs) can only exist if the membrane state is in vicinity…
The understanding of the structural and thermal properties of membranes, low-dimensional flexible systems in a space of higher dimension, is pursued in many fields from string theory to chemistry and biology. The case of a two-dimensional…
A bio tissue model consisting of multilayer spherical cells including four nested radial domains (nucleus, nuclear membrane, cytoplasm and plasma membrane) is worked out to derive the cell heating dynamics in presence of membrane…
We consider a one-dimensional elastic membrane, which is pushed by growing filaments. The filaments tend to grow by creating local protrusions in the membrane and this process has surface energy and bending energy costs. Although it is…