Related papers: Directional interactions and cooperativity between…
We model membrane proteins as anisotropic objects characterized by symmetric-traceless tensors and determine the coupling between these order-parameters and membrane curvature. We consider the interactions between transmembrane proteins…
Numerous cellular functions rely on protein$\unicode{x2013}$protein interactions. Efforts to comprehensively characterize them remain challenged however by the diversity of molecular recognition mechanisms employed within the proteome. Deep…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
The effects of cooperativity are studied within Go-Lennard-Jones models of proteins by making the contact interactions dependent on the proximity to the native conformation. The kinetic universality classes are found to remain the same as…
Membrane proteins are crucial in regulating biomembrane shapes and controlling the dynamic changes in membrane morphology during essential cellular processes. These proteins can localize to regions with their preferred curvatures (curvature…
Cell membranes interact with a myriad of curvature-active proteins that control membrane morphology and are responsible for mechanosensation and mechanotransduction. Some of these proteins, such as those containing BAR domains, are curved…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
Cell shape is determined by a balance of intrinsic properties of the cell as well as its mechanochemical environment. Inhomogeneous shape changes underly many morphogenetic events and involve spatial gradients in active cellular forces…
Despite the recognized importance of the multi-scale spatio-temporal organization of proteins, most computational tools can only access a limited spectrum of time and spatial scales, thereby ignoring the effects on protein behavior of the…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
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…
Simulating protein-membrane interactions is an important and dynamic area of research. A proper definition of electrostatic forces on membrane surfaces is necessary for developing electromechanical models of protein-membrane interactions.…
Central to understanding membrane bound cell signaling is to quantify how the membrane ultra-structure consisting of transient spatial domains modulates signaling and how the signaling influences this ultra-structure. Yet, measuring the…
Collective behavior of proteins on biomembranes is usually studied within the spontaneous curvature model. Here we consider an alternative phenomenological approach, which accounts consistently for partial ordering of proteins as well as…
Biological transport is supported by collective dynamics of enzymatic molecules that are called motor proteins or molecular motors. Experiments suggest that motor proteins interact locally via short-range potentials. We investigate the…
The adhesion of biological membranes is mediated by the binding of membrane-anchored receptor and ligand proteins. Central questions are how the binding kinetics of these proteins is affected by the membranes and by the membrane anchoring…
Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…
The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…
The interaction lifetimes between condensate-forming biomolecules can dictate both the specificity of the condensate-forming species as well as the fluidity and exchange dynamics of these condensates. Using a heuristic modeling approach, we…
Wetting phenomena, molecular protrusions of lipid bilayers and membrane stacks under lateral tension provide physical examples for interacting surfaces with tension. Such surfaces are studied theoretically using functional renormalization…