Related papers: Entropic Tension in Crowded Membranes
Monte Carlo computer simulations are used to study the segregation behaviour of two polymers under cylindrical confinement. Using a multiple-histogram method, the conformational free energy, F, of the polymers was measured as a function of…
A motile cell, when stimulated, shows a dramatic increase in the activity of its membrane, manifested by the appearance of dynamic membrane structures such as lamellipodia, filopodia and membrane ruffles. The external stimulus turns on…
Adhesion bonds between membranes and surfaces are attracted to each other via effective interactions whose origin the entropy loss due to the reduction in the amplitude of the membrane thermal fluctuations in the vicinity of the adhesion…
Membranes are of great technological and biological as well as theoretical interest. Two main classes of membranes can be distinguished: Fluid membranes and polymerized, tethered membranes. Here, we review progress in the theoretical…
The spatio-temporal organization of proteins and the associated morphological changes in membranes are of importance in cell signaling. Several mechanisms that promote the aggregation of proteins at low cell surface concentrations have been…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…
We study the effect of geometric frustration on dilational mechanical metamaterial membranes. While shape frustrated elastic plates can only accommodate non-zero Gaussian curvature up to size scales that ultimately vanish with their elastic…
Water provides the driving force for the assembly and stability of many cellular components. Despite its impact on biological functions, a nanoscale understanding of the relationship between its structure and dynamics under soft confinement…
The entropic force exerted by the Brownian fluctuations of a grafted semiflexible polymer upon a rigid smooth wall are calculated both analytically and by Monte Carlo simulations. Such forces are thought to play an important role for…
Biological environments at micrometer scales and below are often crowded, and experience incessant stochastic thermal fluctuations. The presence of membranes/pores, and multiple biological entities in a constricted space can make the…
Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…
Curvature in biological membranes can be generated by a variety of different molecular mechanisms such as protein scaffolding, lipid or protein asymmetry, cytoskeletal forces, etc. These mechanisms have the net effect of generating stresses…
Stochastic thermodynamics provides a useful set of tools to analyze and constrain the behavior of far from equilibrium systems. In this paper, we report an application of ideas from stochastic thermodynamics to the problem of membrane…
Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs superfamily proteins and other curvature-inducing proteins have anisotropic shapes and anisotropically bend biomembrane. Here, we report how the anisotropic proteins bind the membrane tube and are orientationally ordered…
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…
The hydrodynamic theory of heterogeneous fluid membranes is extended to the case of a membrane adjacent to a solid substrate. We derive the coupling diffusion coefficients of pairs of membrane inclusions in the limit of large separation…
We evaluate the effective Hamiltonian governing, at the optically resolved scale, the elastic properties of micro-manipulated membranes. We identify floppy, entropic-tense and stretched-tense regimes, representing different behaviors of the…
Motivated by recent experiments probing shape, size and dynamics of bacterial chromosomes in growing cells, we consider a polymer model consisting of a circular backbone to which side-loops are attached, confined to a cylindrical cell. Such…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
Using molecular dynamics simulation, we investigate the effect of confinement on a system that comprises several stiff segmented polymer chains where each chain has similar segments, but length and stiffness of the segments vary among the…