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The bioactivity of nanoparticles crucially depends on their ability to cross biomembranes. Recent simulations indicate the cooperative wrapping and internalization of spherical nanoparticles in tubular membrane structures. In this article,…
Besides direct molecular interactions, proteins and nanoparticles embedded in or adsorbed to membranes experience indirect interactions that are mediated by the membranes. These membrane-mediated interactions arise from the membrane…
Cellular internalization of nanoparticles requires the full wrapping of the nanoparticles by the cell membrane. This wrapping process can occur spontaneously if the adhesive interactions between the nanoparticles and the membranes are…
Membrane budding and wrapping of particles, such as viruses and nano-particles, play a key role in intracellular transport and have been studied for a variety of biological and soft matter systems. We study nano-particle wrapping by…
The interaction between nano- or micro-sized particles and cell membranes is of crucial importance in many biological and biomedical applications such as drug and gene delivery to cells and tissues. During their cellular uptake, the…
Elastic sheets with macroscopic dimensions are easy to deform by bending and stretching. Yet shaping nanometric sheets by mechanical manipulation is hard. Here we show that nanoparticle self-assembly could be used to this end. We…
Cellular uptake of nanoplastics is instrumental in their environmental accumulation and transfer to humans through the food chain. Despite extensive studies using spherical plastic nanoparticles, the influence of the morphological…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…
We report numerical simulations of membrane tubulation driven by large colloidal particles. Using Monte Carlo simulations we study how the process depends on particle size, concentration and binding strength, and present accurate free…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
Using computer simulations we show that lipid membranes can mediate linear aggregation of spherical nanoparticles binding to it for a wide range of biologically relevant bending rigidities. This result is in net contrast with the isotropic…
Transport of microscopic objects across biological membranes usually involves membrane deformation to enclose the object followed by detachment of the engulfed particle. However, in artificial membranes, this last topological remodelling…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Lipid membranes form the barrier between the inside and outside of cells and many of their subcompartments. As such, they bind to a wide variety of nano- and micrometer sized objects and, in the presence of strong adhesive forces, strongly…
The transport of particles across lipid-bilayer membranes is important for biological cells to exchange information and material with their environment. Large particles often get wrapped by membranes, a process which has been intensively…
The shapes of cell membranes are largely regulated by membrane associated, curvature active, proteins. We use a numerical model of the membrane with elongated membrane inclusions, recently developed by us, which posses spontaneous…
Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…
Understanding the complexity of fragmentation processes is essential for regulating intercellular communication in mechanistic biology and developing novel bottom-up approaches in a large range of multiphase flow processes. In this context,…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
We develop coarse-grained models that describe the dynamic encapsidation of functionalized nanoparticles by viral capsid proteins. We find that some forms of cooperative interactions between protein subunits and nanoparticles can…