Related papers: A lipid bound actin meshwork organizes liquid phas…

Motivated by the experimental study of Tayebi et al. [Nature Mater. 11, 1074 (2012)] on phase separation of stacked multi-component lipid bilayers, we propose a model composed of stacked two-dimensional Ising spins. We study both its static…

In living cells, protein-rich condensates can wet the cell membrane and surfaces of membrane-bound organelles. Interestingly, many phase-separating proteins also bind to membranes leading to a molecular layer of bound molecules. Here we…

How cells with diverse morphologies and cytoskeletal architectures modulate their mechanical behaviors to drive robust collective motion within tissues is poorly understood. During wound repair within epithelial monolayers in vitro, cells…

We investigate how an active bath of enzymes influences the liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) of a non-interacting condensing protein. The enzyme we choose to use as the active driver is urease, an enzyme that has been shown by several…

The interpretation electrical phenomena in biomembranes is usually based on the assumption that the experimentally found discrete ion conduction events are due to a particular class of proteins called ion channels while the lipid membrane…

We propose a model describing liquid-solid phase coexistence in mixed lipid membranes by including explicitly the occurrence of a rippled phase. For a single component membrane, we employ a previous model in which the membrane thickness is…

We propose a class of microstructurally informed models for the linear elastic mechanical behavior of cross-linked polymer networks such as the actin cytoskeleton. Salient features of the models include the possibility to represent…

Multicomponent lipid mixtures exhibit complex phase behavior, including coexistence of nanoscopic fluid phases in ternary mixtures mimicking the composition of the outer leaflet of mammalian plasma membrane. The physical mechanisms…

In an effort to understand ``rafts'' in biological membranes, we propose phenomenological models for saturated and unsaturated lipid mixtures, and lipid-cholesterol mixtures. We consider simple couplings between the local composition and…

We address the relationship between membrane microheterogeneity and anomalous subdiffusion in cell membranes by carrying out Monte Carlo simulations of two-component lipid membranes. We find that near-critical fluctuations in the membrane…

In experiments on model membranes, a formation of large domains of different lipid composition is readily observed. However, no such phase separation is observed in the membranes of intact cells. Instead, a structure of small transient…

We analyze both the static and dynamic fluctuation spectrum of the red-blood cell in a unified manner, using a simple model of the composite membrane. In this model, the two-dimensional spectrin network that forms the cytoskeleton is…

Amphipathic peptides are considered promising antibiotics because of their ability to form pores in bacterial membranes. In two companion papers, we analyzed both experimentally and theoretically the mechanisms and consequences of the…

Liquid-liquid phase separation is now recognized as a common mechanism for regulating enzyme activity in cells. Insights from studies in cells are complemented by in vitro studies aimed at developing better understanding of mechanisms…

Membrane deformation inside living cells is crucial for the proper shaping of various intracellular organelles and is necessary during the fission/fusion processes that allow membrane recycling and transport (e.g. endocytosis). Proteins…

Mixtures of lipids and cholesterol are commonly used as model systems for studying the formation of liquid-ordered ($L_o$) domains in heterogeneous biological membranes. The simplest model system exhibiting coexistence between $L_o$ domains…

We present a simple coarse-grained bead-and-spring model for lipid bilayers. The system has been developed to reproduce the main (gel-liquid) transition of biological membranes on intermediate length scales of a couple of nanometres and is…

The actin cytoskeleton is remarkably adaptable and multifunctional. It often organizes into nematic bundles such as contractile rings or stress fibers. However, how a uniform and isotropic actin gel self-organizes into dense nematic bundles…

The actomyosin cortex, a thin layer of a cross-linked polymer network near the cell surface, generates active forces that are responsible for cell shape changes. Many developmental processes that involve such cell shape changes, most…

The interplay between phase separation and wetting of multicomponent mixtures is ubiquitous in nature and technology and recently gained significant attention across scientific disciplines, due to the discovery of biomolecular condensates.…