Related papers: Directional interactions and cooperativity between…
Besides direct molecular interactions, proteins and nanoparticles embedded in or adsorbed to membranes experience indirect interactions that are mediated by the membranes. These membrane-mediated interactions arise from the membrane…
Some of the key proteins essential for important cellular processes are capable of recruiting other proteins from the cytosol to phospholipid membranes. The physical basis for this cooperativity of binding is, surprisingly, still unclear.…
Integral membrane proteins deform the surrounding bilayer creating long-ranged forces that influence distant proteins. These forces can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the proteins' shape, height, contact angle with the bilayer, as…
The adhesion of biomembranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. The proteins can only bind if the separation between apposing membranes is sufficiently close to the length of the protein complexes,…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
Membrane bending is an extensively studied problem from both modeling and experimental perspectives because of the wide implications of curvature generation in cell biology. Many of the curvature generating aspects in membranes can be…
Understanding interactions between membranes requires measurements on well-controlled systems close to natural conditions, in which fluctuations play an important role. We have determined, by grazing incidence X-ray scattering, the…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
Recent advances in high-resolution experimental methods have highlighted the significance of cell signal pathway crosstalk and localised signalling activity in the development and disease of numerous biological systems. The investigation of…
Biological membranes are complex, dynamic structures essential for cellular compartmentalization, signaling, and mechanical integrity. The molecular organization of eukaryotic membranes has been extensively studied, including the lipid…
Self-assembly of protein monomers into distinct membrane protein oligomers provides a general mechanism for diversity in the molecular architectures, and resulting biological functions, of membrane proteins. We develop a general physical…
Shapes of biological membranes are dynamically regulated in living cells. Although membrane shape deformation by proteins at thermal equilibrium has been extensively studied, nonequilibrium dynamics have been much less explored. Recently,…
Recent findings suggest that shell protein distribution and morphology of bacterial microcompartments regulate the chemical fluxes facilitating reactions which dictate their biological function. We explore how the morphology and component…
Enzymatic molecules that actively support many cellular processes, including transport, cell division and cell motility, are known as motor proteins or molecular motors. Experimental studies indicate that they interact with each other and…
Hydrophobic thickness mismatch between integral membrane proteins and the surrounding lipid bilayer can produce lipid bilayer thickness deformations. Experiment and theory have shown that protein-induced lipid bilayer thickness deformations…
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…
Mechanosensation is a key part of the sensory repertoire of a vast array of different cells and organisms. The molecular dissection of the origins of mechanosensation is rapidly advancing as a result of both structural and functional…
The growing interest for comparing protein internal dynamics owes much to the realization that protein function can be accompanied or assisted by structural fluctuations and conformational changes. Analogously to the case of functional…
We study a physical model for the interaction between general inclusions bound to fluid membranes that possess finite tension, as well as the usual bending rigidity. We are motivated by an interest in proteins bound to cell membranes that…
Ion channels orchestrate the communication between cells and their environment. These are special proteins capable of changing their shape to allow ions to pass through membranes in response to stimuli like membrane tension. As the letters…