Related papers: Geometry of membranes
A simultaneous variational principle is introduced that offers a novel avenue to the description of the equilibrium configurations, and at the same time of the elementary excitations, or undulations, of fluid lipid membranes, described by a…
Motivated by the motion of biopolymers and membranes in solution, this article presents a formulation of the equations of motion for curves and surfaces in a viscous fluid. We focus on geometrical aspects and simple variational methods for…
Understanding the geometry and topology of configuration or conformational spaces of molecules has relevant applications in chemistry and biology such as the proteins folding problem, drug design and the structure activity relationship…
Lipid-bilayers are the fundamental constituents of the walls of most living cells and lipid vesicles, giving them shape and compartment. The formation and growing of pores in a lipid bilayer have attracted considerable attention from an…
Recent experiments by Kantsler et. al. (2007) have shown that the relaxational dynamics of a vesicle in external elongation flow is accompanied by the formation of wrinkles on a membrane. Motivated by these experiments we present a theory…
We are concerned with underlying connections between fluids, elasticity, isometric embedding of Riemannian manifolds, and the existence of wrinkled solutions of the associated nonlinear partial differential equations. In this paper, we…
Motivated by a long-standing debate concerning the nature and interrelations of surface-tension variables in fluid membranes, we reformulate the thermodynamics of a membrane vesicle as a generic two-dimensional finite system enclosing a…
One of the most widely used methods for determination of the bending elasticity modulus of model lipid membranes is the analysis of the shape fluctuations of nearly spherical lipid vesicles. The theoretical basis of this analysis is given…
A system of PDE describing bilayers amphiphilic membranes is studied by Lie group analysis. This algorithmic approach allows us to show all the symmetries of the system, to determine all possible symmetry reductions, to recover the…
Lipid vesicles appear ubiquitously in biological systems. Understanding how the mechanical and intermolecular interations deform vesicle membrane is a fundamental question in biophysics. In this article we developed a fast algorithm to…
Geometric continuum models for fluid lipid membranes are considered using classical field theory, within a covariant variational approach. The approach is cast as a higher-derivative Lagrangian formulation of continuum classical field…
A model describing cell membranes as optimal shapes with regard to the $L^2$-deficit of their mean curvature to a given constant called spontaneous curvature is considered. It is shown that the corresponding energy functional is lower…
The molecules in lyotropic membranes are typically aligned with the surface normal. When these molecules are chiral, there is a tendency for the molecular direction to twist. These competing effects can reach a compromise by producing…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
Using computer simulations we show that lipid membranes can mediate linear aggregation of spherical nanoparticles binding to it for a wide range of biologically relevant bending rigidities. This result is in net contrast with the isotropic…
Common models for two-phase lipid bilayer membranes are based on an energy that consists of an elastic term for each lipid phase and a line energy at interfaces. Although such an energy controls only the length of interfaces, the membrane…
The theory of geometric structures on a surface with nonempty boundary can be developed by using a decomposition of such a surface into hexagons, in the same way as the theory of geometric structures on a surface without boundary is…
This article summarizes a variety of physical mechanisms proposed in the literature, which can generate micro- and nanodomains in multicomponent lipid bilayers and biomembranes. It mainly focusses on lipid-driven mechanisms that do not…
Soft interfaces can mediate interactions between particles bound to them. The force transmitted through the surface geometry on a particle may be expressed as a closed line integral of the surface stress tensor around that particle. This…
We consider a diffuse interface approximation for the lipid phases of rotationally symmetric two-phase bilayer membranes and rigorously derive its $\Gamma$-limit. In particular, we prove that limit vesicles are $C^1$ across interfaces,…