Related papers: Water permeation through stratum corneum lipid bil…
Atmospheres are products of time-integrated mass exchange between the surface of a planet and its interior. On Earth and other planetary bodies, magma oceans likely marked significant atmosphere-forming events, during which both steam- and…
Free volume pockets or voids are important to many biological processes in cell membranes. Free volume fluctuations are a prerequisite for diffusion of lipids and other macromolecules in lipid bilayers. Permeation of small solutes across a…
We discuss the hydrodynamic collective effects due to active protein molecules that are immersed in lipid bilayer membranes and modeled as stochastic force dipoles. We specifically take into account the presence of the bulk solvent which…
The conformational free energy landscape of a system is a fundamental thermodynamic quantity of importance particularly in the study of soft matter and biological systems, in which the entropic contributions play a dominant role. While…
We describe several unexpected phenomena, caused by a solid-solid phase transition (gel-to-crystal) typical for all main classes of lipid substances - phospholipids, triglycerides, diglycerides, alkanes, etc. We discovered that this…
We use numerical simulation to examine the possibility of a reversible liquid-liquid transition in supercooled water and related systems. In particular, for two atomistic models of water, we have computed free energies as functions of…
When a droplet containing a concentrated suspension evaporates in a dry environment, a layer often forms at the interface accumulating non-volatile material. Such a "skin layer" experiences strong stresses and eventually turns mechanically…
In this paper, we study the effects of both the amount of open cell walls and their aperture sizes on solid foams permeability. FEM flow simulations are performed at both pore and macroscopic scales. For foams with fully interconnected…
Microgels are often discussed as well-suited model system for soft colloids. In contrast to rigid spheres, the microgel volume and, coupled to this, the volume fraction in dispersion can be manipulated by external stimuli. This behavior is…
We study lithium depletion in low-mass and solar-like stars as a function of time, using a new diffusion coefficient describing extra-mixing taking place at the bottom of a convective envelope. This new form is motivated by…
Heat and mass transfer inside the porous wick of a capillary evaporator is studied using a mixed pore-network model. The impact of the thermal conductivity of the wick on the overheating limit (defined as the difference between the maximum…
Among aquaglyceroporins that transport both water and glycerol across the cell membrane, Escherichia coli glycerol uptake facilitator (GlpF) is the most thoroughly studied. However, one question remains: Does glycerol modulate water…
In the mammalian plasma membrane, cholesterol can translocate rapidly between the exoplasmic and cytoplasmic leaves, so that its distribution between them should be given by the equality of its chemical potential in the leaves. Due to its…
Amphiphilic lipid bilayers modify the friction properties of the surfaces on top of which they are deposited. In particular, the measured sliding friction coefficient is significantly reduced compared with the native surface. We investigate…
We study the flow of membranal fluid through a ring of immobile particles mimicking, for example, a fence around a membrane corral. We obtain a simple closed-form expression for the permeability coefficient of the ring as a function of the…
Many of the cell membrane vital functions are achieved by the self-organization of the proteins and biopolymers embedded in it. The protein dynamics are in part determined by its drag. A large number of these proteins can polymerize to form…
We consider a model of bilayer lipid membrane with bola-lipids. The bola-lipid is modeled by linking tails of the hydrophobic chains in the opposite monolayers within bilayer as a first approximation. A number of thermodynamical…
Curvature-sensing and curvature-remodeling proteins are known to reshape cell membranes, and this remodeling event is essential for key biophysical processes such as tubulation, exocytosis, and endocytosis. Curvature-inducing proteins can…
Implicit solvent, coarse-grained models with pairwise interactions can access the largest length and time scales in molecular dynamics simulations, owing to the absence of interactions with a huge number of solvent particles, the smaller…
Coarse-grained continuous descriptions for lipid bilayers are typically based on minimizing the Helfrich energy. Such models consider the fluid properties of these structures only implicitly and have been shown to nicely reproduce…