Related papers: Bleb Nucleation through Membrane Peeling
We discuss the physical mechanisms that promote or suppress the nucleation of a fluid-filled lumen inside a cell assembly or a tissue. We discuss lumen formation in a continuum theory of tissue material properties in which the tissue is…
Eukaryotic cells intrinsically change their shape, by changing the composition of their membrane and by restructuring their underlying cytoskeleton. We present here further studies and extensions of a minimal physical model, describing a…
We study the spontaneous nucleation and crystallization of linear and cyclic chains of flexibly connected hard spheres using extensive molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we present a novel event-driven molecular dynamics…
Conical inclusions in a lipid bilayer generate an overall spontaneous curvature of the membrane that depends on concentration and geometry of the inclusions. Examples are integral and attached membrane proteins, viruses, and lipid domains.…
Experiments reveal that structural transitions in thin sheets are mediated by the passage of transient and stable mobile localized elastic excitations. These ``crumples'' or ``d-cones'' nucleate, propagate, interact, annihilate, and escape.…
The nucleation and/or growth of cracks in elastic-brittle solids has been recently described in [14] in terms of a special class of measures and with a variational technique requiring the minimization of a certain energy over classes of…
Mechanical cues from the extracellular microenvironment play a central role in regulating the structure, function and fate of living cells. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the mechanisms and processes underlying this crucial cellular…
Complex textured surfaces occur in nature and industry, from fingerprints to lithography-based micropatterns. Wrinkling by confinement to an incompatible substrate is an attractive way of generating reconfigurable patterned topographies,…
Homogeneous nucleation, a textbook transition path for phase transitions, is typically understood on thermodynamic grounds through the prism of classical nucleation theory. However, recent studies have suggested the applicability of…
Biological membranes are one of the most basic structures and regions of interest in cell biology. In the study of membranes, segment extraction is a well-known and difficult problem because of impeding noise, directional and thickness…
We develop a theory for nucleation on top of islands in epitaxial growth based on the derivation of lifetimes and rates governing individual microscopic processes. These processes are strongly affected by the additional step edge barrier…
Advances in nanotechnology lead to an increasing interest in how nanoparticles interact with biomembranes. Nanoparticles are wrapped spontaneously by biomembranes if the adhesive interactions between the particles and membranes compensate…
Beams made from thin-walled elements, whilst very efficient in terms of the structural strength and stiffness to weight ratios, can be susceptible to highly complex instability phenomena. A nonlinear analytical formulation based on…
The study of interactions between biomimetic membranes and micron-sized particles is crucial for understanding various biological processes. Here, we control microparticle spontaneous engulfment by giant lipid vesicles by tuning particle…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
A variational lattice model is proposed to define an evolution of sets from a single point (nucleation) following a criterion of "maximization" of the perimeter. At a discrete level, the evolution has a "checkerboard" structure and its…
Neutrinoless double beta decay searches are currently among the major foci of experimental physics. The observation of such a decay will have important implications in our understanding of the intrinsic nature of neutrinos and shed light on…
We consider the lateral diffusion of a protein interacting with the curvature of the membrane. The interaction energy is minimized if the particle is at a membrane position with a certain curvature that agrees with the spontaneous curvature…
We formulate a theoretical model of the shear failure of a thin film tethered to a rigid substrate. The interface between film and substrate is modeled as a cohesive layer with randomly fluctuating shear strength/fracture energy. We…
An elastic membrane that is forced to reside in a container smaller than its natural size will deform and, upon further volume reduction, eventually crumple. The crumpled state is characterized by the localization of energy in a complex…