Related papers: Morphology and Interaction between Lipid Domains
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of materials and information between cells and their organelles. Further, lipid composition and morphology can play a key role in regulating a variety of biological processes. For example, viral uptake,…
Rafts, or functional domains, are transient nano- or mesoscopic structures in the plasma membrane and are thought to be essential for many cellular processes such as signal transduction, adhesion, trafficking and lipid/protein sorting.…
In experiments on model membranes, a formation of large domains of different lipid composition is readily observed. However, no such phase separation is observed in the membranes of intact cells. Instead, a structure of small transient…
Lipid rafts are heterogeneous dynamic lipid domains of the cell membranes that are involved in several biological processes, like protein and lipids specific transport and signaling. Our understanding of lipid raft formation is still…
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…
We investigate how an externally imposed curvature influences lipid segregation on two-phase-coexistent membranes. We show that the bending-modulus contrast of the two phases and the curvature act together to yield a reduced effective line…
Liposomes that achieve a heterogeneous and spatially organized surface through phase separation have been recognized to be a promising platform for delivery purposes. However, their design and optimization through experimentation can be…
A model of lipid bilayers made of a mixture of two lipids with different average compositions on both leaflets, is developed. A Landau hamiltonian describing the lipid-lipid interactions on each leaflet, with two lipidic fields $\psi_1$ and…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
Multi-component membranes such as ternary mixtures of lipids and cholesterol can exhibit coexistence regions between two liquid phases. When such membranes adhere to a corrugated substrate, the phase separation process strongly depends on…
Ever since the raft model for biomembranes has been proposed, the traditional view of biomembranes based on the fluid-mosaic model has been altered. In the raft model, dynamical heterogeneities in multi-component lipid bilayers play an…
Unravelling the physical mechanisms behind the organisation of lipid domains is a central goal in cell biology and membrane biophysics. Previous studies on cells and model lipid bilayers featuring phase-separated domains found an intricate…
Membrane organization is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is to understand the lateral heterogeneous structures in membranes and membrane fluidity in the presence of…
According to the lipid raft hypothesis, biological lipid membranes are laterally heterogeneous and filled with nanoscale ordered "raft" domains, which are believed to play an important role for the organization of proteins in membranes.…
We propose a model describing liquid-solid phase coexistence in mixed lipid membranes by including explicitly the occurrence of a rippled phase. For a single component membrane, we employ a previous model in which the membrane thickness is…
Membrane phase-separation is a mechanism that biological membranes often use to locally concentrate specific lipid species in order to organize diverse membrane processes. Phase separation has also been explored as a tool for the design of…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
Lipid phase heterogeneity in the plasma membrane is thought to be crucial for many aspects of cell signaling, but the physical basis of participating membrane domains such as "lipid rafts" remains controversial. Here we consider a lattice…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Membrane proteins often form dimers and higher-order oligomers whose stability and spatial organization depend sensitively on their lipid environment. To investigate the physical principles underlying this coupling, we employ a lattice…