Related papers: Sequence-specific polyampholyte phase separation i…
Compartmentalization is ubiquitous in the broad cellular context, especially in the formation of membraneless organelles (MOs). Membraneless organelles (MOs) are phase-separated liquid compartments that provide spatiotemporal control of…
We present a minimal model to study liquid phase separation in a fixed pH ensemble. The model describes a mixture composed of macromolecules that exist in three different charge states and have a tendency to phase separate. We introduce the…
The phase separation in lipid bilayers that include negatively charged lipids is examined experimentally. We observed phase-separated structures and determined the membrane miscibility temperatures in several binary and ternary lipid…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has emerged as a fundamental mechanism underlying intracellular organization, with evidence for it being reported in numerous different systems. However, there is a growing concern regarding the lack of…
We consider the phase separation in an asymmetrically charged lipid bilayer membrane consisting of neutral and negatively charged lipids that are in contact with in/out ionic solutions having different ionic strengths. The two asymmetric…
We study the thermodynamic behavior of nonpolar liquid mixtures in the vicinity of curved charged objects, such as electrodes or charged colloids. For small enough charge on the object, or equivalently, small potential, the…
Random polyampholytes (PAs) contain positively and negatively charged monomers that are distributed randomly along the polymer chain. The interaction between charges is assumed to be given by the Debye-Huckel potential. We show that the…
Biomolecular condensates, physically underpinned to a significant extent by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), are now widely recognized by numerous experimental studies to be of fundamental biological, biomedical, and biophysical…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is emerging as a crucial phenomenon in several fundamental cell processes. A range of eukaryotic systems exhibit liquid condensates. However, their function in bacteria, which in general lack membrane-bound…
Phase separation of a liquid mixture embedded within an elastic network is relevant to a wide range of natural and industrial systems, including biomolecular condensates interacting with the cytoskeleton, structural colouring in bird…
Proteins and nucleic acids can spontaneously self-assemble into membraneless droplet-like compartments, both in vitro and in vivo. A key component of these droplets are multi-valent proteins that possess several adhesive domains with…
Phase separation of sequence-disordered liquid crystalline polymers, a promising class of technological and biological relevance, is studied by field theory, and thermodynamic mechanisms responsible for orientational ordering observed in…
The mechanical response of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and polyampholyte (PA) chains is vital for understanding their biological functions and designing functional materials. We investigate the force-extension behavior of a PA…
The formation of polarized signaling domains on cell membranes is a fundamental example of biological pattern formation. While such patterns resemble structures from equilibrium phase separation, they are intrinsically non-equilibrium,…
We theoretically study mixtures of chemically-interacting particles, which produce or consume a chemical to which they are attracted or repelled, in the most general case of many coexisting species. We find a new class of active phase…
The behavior of polyelectrolytes and polyampholytes in semi-dilute solutions is investigated theoretically. Various statistical charge distributions along the polyelectrolyte chains are considered: smeared, annealed, permuted and quenched.…
Membraneless droplets or liquid condensates formed via liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) play a pivotal role in cell biology and hold potential for biomedical engineering. While membraneless droplets are often studied in the context of…
The phase behavior of membrane proteins stems from a complex synergy with the amphiphilic molecules required for their solubilization. We show that ionization of a pH-sensitive surfactant, LDAO, bound to a bacterial photosynthetic protein,…
Using a multi-phase field model, we examine how particle deformability, which is a proxy for cell stiffness, affects motility induced phase separation (MIPS). We show that purely repulsive deformable, i.e., squishy, cells phase separate…
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are a subset of proteins that lack stable secondary structure. Given their polymeric nature, previous mean-field approximations have been used to describe the statistical structure of IDPs. However,…