Related papers: Response to Halatek and Frey: Effective two-dimens…
Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) composed of as few as three lipid species can phase separate into small-scale lipid domains with stripes and dots patterns. These patterns have been experimentally characterized in terms of how their size…
Many essential cellular processes, including cell division and the establishment of cell polarity during embryogenesis, are regulated by pattern-forming proteins. These proteins often need to bind to a substrate, such as the cell membrane,…
Here we provide a thorough discussion of the model for Min protein dynamics proposed by Schweizer et al. [11]. The manuscript serves as supplementary document for our letter to the editor to appear in PNAS. Our analysis is based on the…
We introduce a three-dimensional stochastic reaction-diffusion model to describe MinD/MinE dynamical structures in Escherichia coli. This model spontaneously generates pole-to-pole oscillations of the membrane-associated MinD proteins, MinE…
Colloids and proteins alike can bind to lipid bilayers and move laterally in these two-dimensional fluids. Inspired by proteins that generate membrane curvature, sense the underlying membrane geometry, and migrate to high curvature sites,…
Spatial organization of proteins in cells is important for many biological functions. In general, the nonlinear, spatially coupled models for protein-pattern formation are only accessible to numerical simulations, which has limited insight…
Experiments on supported lipid bilayers featuring liquid ordered/disordered domains have shown that the spatial arrangement of the lipid domains and their chemical composition are strongly affected by the curvature of the substrate.…
A reduced model, which can fold both helix and sheet structures, is proposed to study the problem of protein folding. The goal of this model is to find an unbiased effective potential that has included the effects of water and at the same…
The organization of lipids in biological membranes is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is how to control lateral lipid composition in supported membranes which are…
Controlling the phases of matter is a challenge that spans from condensed materials to biological systems. Here, by imposing a geometric boundary condition, we study controlled collective motion of Escherichia coli bacteria. A circular…
We use the oscillating Min proteins of Escherichia coli as a prototype system to illustrate the current state and potential of modeling protein dynamics in space and time. We demonstrate how a theoretical approach has led to striking new…
A model of lipid bilayers made of a mixture of two lipids with different average compositions on both leaflets, is developed. A Landau hamiltonian describing the lipid-lipid interactions on each leaflet, with two lipidic fields $\psi_1$ and…
We theoretically investigate the dynamics of a floating lipid bilayer membrane coupled with a two-dimensional cytoskeleton network, taking into explicitly account the intermonolayer friction, the discrete lattice structure of the…
This article concludes a three-part series developing a self-consistent theoretical framework of the electromechanics of lipid membranes at the continuum scale. Owing to their small thickness, lipid membranes are commonly modeled as…
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…
The spatiotemporal oscillation patterns of the proteins MinD and MinE are used by the bacterium E. coli to sense its own geometry. Strikingly, both computer simulations and experiments have recently shown that for the same geometry of the…
Unravelling the physical mechanisms behind the organisation of lipid domains is a central goal in cell biology and membrane biophysics. Previous studies on cells and model lipid bilayers featuring phase-separated domains found an intricate…
We propose a new type of traveling wave pattern, one that can adapt to the size of physical system in which it is embedded. Such a system arises when the initial state has an instability that extends down to zero wavevector, connecting at…
Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…
We present a simple, and physically motivated, coarse-grained model of a lipid bilayer, suited for micron scale computer simulations. Each ~25 nm^2 patch of bilayer is represented by a spherical particle. Mimicking forces of hydrophobic…