Related papers: Geometry of membranes
The interplay of membrane proteins is vital for many biological processes, such as cellular transport, cell division, and signal transduction between nerve cells. Theoretical considerations have led to the idea that the membrane itself…
Changes in the geometry and topology of self-assembled membranes underlie diverse processes across cellular biology and engineering. Similar to lipid bilayers, monolayer colloidal membranes have in-plane fluid-like dynamics and out-of-plane…
Shells, when confined, can deform in a broad assortment of shapes and patterns, often quite dissimilar to what is produced by their flat counterparts (plates). In this work we discuss the morphological landscape of shells deposited on a…
Capillary forces are involved in a variety of natural phenomena, ranging from droplet breakup to the physics of clouds. The forces from surface tension can also be exploited in industrial application provided the length scales involved are…
We describe the growth of vesicles, due to the accretion of lipid molecules to their surface, in terms of linear irreversible thermodynamics. Our treatment differs from those previously put forward by consistently including the energy of…
We conduct a systematic exploration of the energy landscape of vesicle morphologies within the framework of the Helfrich model. Vesicle shapes are determined by minimizing the elastic energy subject to constraints of constant area and…
The parametric equations of the plane curves determining the equilibrium shapes that a uniform inextensible elastic ring or tube could take subject to a uniform hydrostatic pressure are presented in an explicit analytic form. The…
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 present a field theory to describe the composition of a surface spontaneously exchanging matter with its bulk environment. By only assuming matter conservation in the system, we show with extensive numerical simulations that, depending…
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izbGXdjvK_I for a YouTube video showing part of the results in this paper.We will consider surfaces whose mean curvature at a point is a linear function of the square of the distance from that point to the…
This study develops an equation for describing three-dimensional membrane transformation through proliferation of its component cells regulated by morphogen density distributions on the membrane. The equation is developed in a…
Uncovering the rules governing the nonequilibrium dynamics of the membranes that define biological cells is of central importance to understanding the physics of living systems. We theoretically and computationally investigate the behavior…
Using a microscopic phase-space model of the membrane system, the boundary condition at a membrane is derived. According to the condition, the substance flow across the membrane is proportional to the difference of the substance…
The shape equation for an axisymmetric fluid membrane is derived, assuming action of an uniform external electric field. The flexoelectric contribution to the free energy of the membrane, stemming from the latter is accounted within the…
The dynamics of a membrane is a coupled system comprising a moving elastic surface and an incompressible membrane fluid. We will consider a reduced elastic surface model, which involves the evolution equations of the moving surface, the…
Cell fate decisions emerge as a consequence of a complex set of gene regulatory networks. Models of these networks are known to have more parameters than data can determine. Recent work, inspired by Waddington's metaphor of a landscape, has…
We study the indentation of a free-standing lipid membrane suspended over a nanopore on a hydrophobic substrate by means of molecular dynamics simulations. We find that in the course of indentation, the membrane bends at the point of…
The goal of this paper is to investigate some rigidity properties of stable solutions of elliptic equations set on manifolds with boundary. We provide several types of results, according to the dimension of the manifold and the sign of its…
The chiral structure of liquid crystalline phases arises due to the intrinsic chirality of the constituent mesogens. While it is seemingly straightforward to quantify the macroscopic chirality by using, for instance, the cholesteric pitch…
Bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs) are an essential component of many biological systems, forming a functional barrier between the cell and the surrounding environment. When the membrane relaxes from a structural perturbation, the dynamics of…