Related papers: Geometry of membranes
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…
Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) composed of as few as three lipid species can phase separate into small-scale lipid domains with stripes and dots patterns. These patterns have been experimentally characterized in terms of how their size…
The issue of different parameterizations of the axisymmetric vesicle shape addressed by Hu Jian-Guo and Ou-Yang Zhong-Can [ Phys.Rev. E {\bf 47} (1993) 461 ] is reassesed, especially as it transpires through the corresponding Euler -…
The shapes of cell membranes are largely regulated by membrane associated, curvature active, proteins. We use a numerical model of the membrane with elongated membrane inclusions, recently developed by us, which posses spontaneous…
The disk-to-vesicle transition of a fluid membrane with no spontaneous curvature is well described by the competition between edge line and curvature energies. However, the transition of asymmetric membranes with spontaneous curvatures is…
A coarse-grained molecular model, which consists of a spherical particle and an orientation vector, is proposed to simulate lipid membrane on a large length scale. The solvent is implicitly represented by an effective attractive interaction…
In textural equilibrium, partially molten materials minimise the total surface energy bound up in grain boundaries and grain-melt interfaces. Here, numerical calculations of such textural equilibrium geometries are presented for a…
The organization of lipids in biological membranes is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is how to control lateral lipid composition in supported membranes which are…
Since the lipid raft model was developed at the end of the last century, it became clear that the specific molecular arrangements of phospholipid assemblies within a membrane have profound implications in a vast range of physiological…
In biology, cells undergo deformations under the action of flow caused by the fluid surrounding them. These flows lead to shape changes and instabilities that have been explored in detail for single component vesicles. However, cell…
Lipid membranes have complex compositions and modeling the thermodynamic properties of multi-component lipid systems remains a remote goal. In this work we attempt to describe the thermodynamics of binary lipid mixtures by mapping…
Amphiphiles are molecules which have both hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts. In water- and/or oil-like solvent, they self-assemble into extended sheet-like structures due to the hydrophobic effect. The free energy of an amphiphilic system…
We study the equilibrium conformations of a lipid domain on a planar fluid membrane where the domain is decorated by a vector field representing the tilt of the stiff fatty acid chains of the lipid molecules, while the surrounding membrane…
Fluid membranes endowed with tangent-plane order (TPO) such as tilt- and hexatic order afford unique soft matter systems for investigating the interplay between elasticity, shape, topology, and thermal fluctuations. Using the…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…
In the presence of a non-adsorbing polymer, monodisperse rod-like particles assemble into colloidal membranes, which are one rod-length thick liquid-like monolayers of aligned rods. Unlike 3D edgeless bilayer vesicles, colloidal monolayer…
In order to study a one-dimensional analogue of the spontaneous curvature model for two-component lipid bilayer membranes we consider planar curves that are made of a material with two phases. Each phase induces a preferred curvature to the…
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…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
"Necks" are features of lipid membranes characterized by an uniquley large curvature, functioning as bridges between different compartments. These features are ubiquitous in the life-cycle of the cell and instrumental in processes such as…