Related papers: Vesicles as osmotically stressed capsules
Lipid vesicles consist of aqueous cores surrounded by a bilayer of phospholipids. Hybrid polymer-lipid vesicles incorporate both polymers and lipids, offering promising properties for developing pharmaceuticals, biosensors, and artificial…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
Viscoelastic fluids are a common subclass of rheologically complex materials that are encountered in diverse fields from biology to polymer processing. Often the flows of viscoelastic fluids are unstable in situations where ordinary…
The entropy of a polymer confined in a curved surface and the elastic free energy of a membrane consisting of polymers are obtained by scaling analysis. It is found that the elastic free energy of the membrane has the form of the in-plane…
We characterize vesicle adhesion onto homogeneous substrates by means of a perturbative expansion around the infinite adhesion limit, where curvature elasticity effects are absent. At first order in curvature elasticity, we determine…
We study theoretically the viscoelastic properties of sheared binary fluids that have strong dynamical asymmetry between the two components. The dynamical asymmetry arises due to asymmetry between the viscoelastic stresses, particularly the…
We examine the shape of droplets atop deformable thin elastomeric films prepared with an anisotropic tension. As the droplets generate a deformation in the taut film through capillary forces, they assume a shape that is elongated along the…
Formation and rupture of vesicles is a fundamental process underlying diverse phenomena in biology, materials science, and biomedical applications. Vesicles form when the area of a growing disk-like membrane exceeds a critical value at…
(200 words) Oxidation of unsaturated lipids is a fundamental process involved in cell bioenergetics as well as in cell death. Using giant unilamellar vesicles and a chlorin photosensitizer, we asymmetrically oxidized the outer or inner…
The influence of the internal structure of a biological cell (e.g., a leukocyte) on its dynamics and rheology is not yet fully understood. By using 2D numerical simulations of a bilamellar vesicle (BLV) consisting of two vesicles as a cell…
A numerical and systematic parameter study of three-dimensional vesicle electrohydrodynamics is presented to investigate the effects of different fluid and membrane properties. The dynamics of vesicles in the presence of DC electric fields…
Viscosity is a key property of cell membranes that controls mobility of embedded proteins and membrane remodeling. Measuring it is challenging because existing approaches involve complex experimental designs and/or models, and the…
It is well-known that the architecture of macromolecules plays an important role in the hydrodynamics and viscosity of its semi-diluted solutions. However, the systematic study of the rheology of macromolecules with complex topology, such…
We investigate the nonlinear viscoelastic behavior of a biomimetic scale-covered beam in which shear-dependent complex fluids are trapped between overlapping scales under bending loads. These fluids mimic biological mucus and slime layers…
Epithelial tissues act as barriers and, therefore, must repair themselves, respond to environmental changes and grow without compromising their integrity. Consequently, they exhibit complex viscoelastic rheological behavior where…
A very simple model for cell swelling by osmosis is introduced, resulting in a parabolic free boundary problem. In case of radially symmetric initial conditions, it is shown that the model can be viewed as a gradient flow involving entropy,…
Subjected to compressive stresses, soft polymers with stiffness gradients can display various buckling patterns. These compressive stresses can have different origins, like mechanical forces, temperature changes, or, for hydrogel materials,…
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,…
Many metastable complex fluids such as colloidal glasses and gels show distinct nonlinear viscoelasticity with increasing oscillatory-strain amplitude; the storage modulus decreases monotonically as the strain amplitude increases whereas…
This paper is concerned with the diffusion of a fluid through a viscoelastic solid undergoing large deformations. Using ideas from the classical theory of mixtures and a thermodynamic framework based on the notion of maximization of the…