Related papers: Small membranes under negative surface tension
Branching of bilayer membranes appear in the inverted hexagonal phase as well as in metastable states of the lamellar phase such as membrane fusion intermediates. A method for estimating the line tension of the branching junction is…
The biological function of membranes is closely related to their softness, which is often studied through the membranes' thermally-driven fluctuations. The analysis commonly assumes that the relaxation rate of a pure bending deformation is…
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…
We consider equivalent mechanical model of liquid sloshing in partially-filled cylindrical vessel; the model treats both the regime of linear sloshing, and strongly nonlinear sloshing regime. The latter is related to hydraulic impacts…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…
Curvature in biological membranes can be generated by a variety of different molecular mechanisms such as protein scaffolding, lipid or protein asymmetry, cytoskeletal forces, etc. These mechanisms have the net effect of generating stresses…
A widely used method to measure the bending rigidity of bilayer membranes is fluctuation spectroscopy, which analyses the thermally-driven membrane undulations of giant unilamellar vesicles recorded with either phase-contrast or confocal…
We consider the sedimentation of a colloidal gel under confinement in the direction of gravity. The confinement allows us to compare directly experiments and computer simulations, for the same system size in the vertical direction. The…
We propose a mechanism for mechanical regulation at the membrane of living cells, based on the exchange of membrane area between the cell membrane and a membrane reservoir. The reservoir is composed of invaginated membrane microdomains…
We present measurements of the fluctuation spectrum of giant vesicles containing bacteriorhodopsin (BR) pumps using video-microscopy. When the pumps are activated, we observe a significant increase of the fluctuations in the low wavevector…
The dynamic shape relaxation of the two-layer-vesicle is calculated. In additional to the undulation relaxation where the two bilayers move in the same direction, the squeezing mode appears when the gap between the two bilayers is small. At…
Recent experiments by Kantsler et. al. (2007) have shown that the relaxational dynamics of a vesicle in external elongation flow is accompanied by the formation of wrinkles on a membrane. Motivated by these experiments we present a theory…
The influence of an electric field on a poorly conductive membrane such as a lipid bilayer is studied theoretically. The unbalanced electric stress created by an ionic current across a non-perfectly flat membrane gives rise to a…
Theoretical studies of nearly spherical vesicles and microemulsion droplets, that present typical examples for thermally-excited systems that are subject to constraints, are reviewed. We consider the shape fluctuations of such systems…
An analytical theory is developed to describe the dynamics of a closed lipid bilayer membrane (vesicle) freely suspended in a general linear flow. Considering a nearly spherical shape, the solution to the creeping-flow equations is obtained…
Utilising Onsager's variational formulation, we derive dynamical equations for the relaxation of a fluid membrane tube in the limit of small deformation, allowing for a contrast of solvent viscosity across the membrane and variations in…
We study thermal fluctuations of a free-standing bilayer graphene subject to vanishing external tension. Within a phenomenological theory, the system is described as a stack of two continuum crystalline membranes, characterized by finite…
The study of vesicles in suspension is important to understand the complicated dynamics exhibited by cells in vivo and in vitro. We developed a computer simulation based on the boundary-integral method to model the three dimensional…
The equilibrium and fluctuation methods for determining the surface tension, $\sigma$, and bending modulus, $\kappa$, of a bilayer membrane with a fixed projected area are discussed. In the fluctuation method the elastic coefficients…
Take a drinking straw and bend it from its ends. After sufficient bending, the tube buckles forming a kink, where the curvature is localized in a very small area. This instability, known generally as the Brazier effect, is inherent to…