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The formation and proliferation of protein aggregates play a central role in a number of devastating neuro-degenerative diseases. Many experimental studies indicate that the ability of existing aggregates to replicate is a key property in…
The empirical observation of aggregation of dielectric particles under the influence of electrostatic forces lies at the origin of the theory of electricity. The growth of clusters formed of small grains underpins a range of phenomena from…
Protein folding, peptide aggregation and crystallization, as well as adsorption of molecules on soft or solid substrates have an essential feature in common: In all these processes, structure formation is guided by a collective, cooperative…
Folding and aggregation of proteins, the interaction between proteins and membranes, as well as the adsorption of organic soft matter to inorganic solid substrates belong to the most interesting challenges in understanding structure and…
Cellular functions are established through biological evolution, but are constrained by the laws of physics. For instance, the physics of protein folding limits the lengths of cellular polypeptide chains. Consequently, many cellular…
The self-assembly of particles into organized structures is a key feature of living organisms and a major engineering challenge. While it may proceed through the binding of perfectly matched, puzzle-pieces-like particles, many other…
Preliminary results are presented for the kinetics of phase separation in three distinct models of protein aggregation. The first is a model of the formation of spherical microcrystals of insulin via an initial formation of fractal clusters…
The stochastic Eden model of charged particles aggregation in two-dimensional systems is presented. This model is governed by two parameters: screening length of electrostatic interaction, $\lambda $, and short range attraction energy, $E$.…
Proteins can combine into functional elements in living cells or self-assemble into unwanted structures in a number of diseases. The resulting aggregates often display filamentous morphologies across a large range of protein shapes and…
Inside a cell, heterotypic proteins assemble in inhomogeneous, crowded systems where the abundance of these proteins vary with cell types. While some protein complexes form putative structures that can be visualized with imaging, there are…
Interparticle interactions and bulk properties of colloidal suspensions can be substantially modified by addition of nanoparticles. Extreme asymmetries in size and charge between colloidal particles and nanoparticles present severe…
The formation of correlated structures is of importance in many diverse contexts such as strongly coupled plasmas, soft matter, and even biological mediums. In all these contexts the dynamics are mainly governed by electrostatic…
Proteins are dynamic, adopting ensembles of conformations. The nature of this conformational heterogenity is imprinted in the raw electron density measurements obtained from X-ray crystallography experiments. Fitting an ensemble of protein…
In living cells, proteins self-assemble into large functional structures based on specific interactions between molecularly complex patches. Due to this complexity, protein self-assembly results from a competition between a large number of…
We present a generic model to describe the fractal self-assembly of proteins in terms of electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions. The predictions of the model were correlated with the simulated fractals obtained using patchy…
Multiple phenotypic protein expressions arising from one genome represent variations in the protein relative abundance and their stoichiometry. A lack of definite compositional parts challenges the modeling of protein megacomplexes and…
Proteins exist as a dynamic ensemble of multiple conformations, and these motions are often crucial for their functions. However, current structure prediction methods predominantly yield a single conformation, overlooking the conformational…
We present an extended structural study of globular complexes made by mixing a positively charge protein (lysozyme) and a negatively charged polyelectrolyte (PSS). We study the influence of all the parameters that may act on the structure…
We investigate the formation of polycrystalline structures in a class of particle systems. The atomistic energy is modeled as a sum of particle energies that favor atoms being locally isometric to a reference lattice. The discrete frame…
Electrostatic interactions fundamentally govern the structure, stability, and dynamics of charged (bio)matter, yet the impact of heterogeneous and anisotropic charge distributions on the behavior of protein solutions remains elusive. Here,…