Related papers: A lipid bound actin meshwork organizes liquid phas…
Pattern formation and the mechanics of a mixture of actin filaments and myosin motors that is confined by a rigid membrane is investigated. By using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics model, we demonstrate that the competition between the…
Tissue boundaries pattern embryos, suppress tumours, and provide directional cues. Tissue boundaries are associated with supracellular cables formed by actin and the molecular motor non-muscle myosin II. Actomyosin cables generate tension…
The synthetic actin network arouses great interest as bio-material due to its soft and wet nature that mimics many biological scaffolding structures. Inside the cell, the actin network is regulated by tens of actin-binding proteins (ABP's),…
Vesicle fusion is an important process underlying cell division, transport, and membrane trafficking. In phospholipid systems, a range of fusogens including divalent cations and depletants have been shown to induce adhesion, hemifusion, and…
A molecular model is proposed of a bilayer consisting of fully saturated DPPC and mono unsaturated DOPC. The model not only encompasses the constant density within the hydrophobic core of the bilayer, but also the tendency of chain segments…
Actin is one of the most studied cytoskeleton proteins showing a very rich span of structures. It can self-assemble actively into dynamical structures that govern the mechanical properties of the cell, its motility and its division.…
Many ternary mixtures composed of saturated and unsaturated lipids with cholesterol (Chol) exhibit a region of coexistence between liquid-disordered $(L_d)$ and liquid-ordered $(L_o)$ domains, bearing some similarities to lipid rafts in…
We present a novel flow instability that can arise in thin films of cytoskeletal fluids if the friction with the substrate on which the film lies is sufficiently strong. We consider a two dimensional, membrane-bound fragment containing…
Many cellular organelles are membrane-bound structures with complex membrane composition and shape. Their shapes have been observed to depend on the metabolic state of the organelle, and the mechanisms that couple biochemical pathways and…
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of materials and information between cells and their organelles. Further, lipid composition and morphology can play a key role in regulating a variety of biological processes. For example, viral uptake,…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
Depletion interactions are thought to significantly contribute to the organization of intracellular structures in the crowded cytosol. The strength of depletion interactions depends on physical parameters like the depletant number density…
The synthetic actin network demands great interest as bio-material due to its soft and wet nature that mimic many biological scaffolding structures. The study of these structures can contribute to a better understanding of this new…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is key to understanding aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS) arising throughout cell biology, medical science, and the pharmaceutical industry. Controlling the detailed morphology of phase-separating compound…
We study the phase separation of binary lipid mixtures that form bicontinuous cubic phases. The competition between non-uniform Gaussian membrane curvature and line tension leads to a very rich phase diagram, where we observe symmetry…
The adhesion bonds connecting a lipid bilayer to an underlying surface may undergo a condensation transition resulting from an interplay between a short range attractive potential between them, and a long range fluctuation-induced potential…
We model the spatiotemporal dynamics of cellular protein concentrations near membranes composed of different lipids using a three-variable continuum model for membrane-bound protein, cytosolic protein, and the local composition of a binary…
A question of considerable interest to cell membrane biology is whether phase segregated domains across an asymmetric bilayer are strongly correlated with each other and whether phase segregation in one leaflet can induce segregation in the…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
We present a phenomenological theory for the phase behavior of ternary mixtures of cholesterol and saturated and unsaturated lipids, one which describes both liquid and gel phases, and illuminates the mechanism of the behavior. In a binary…