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Micromotor and nanomotor particles are typically made using dense solid particles that can sediment or be trapped in confined flow environments. Creation of much larger motors should be possible if a very low-density system is used with…
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…
Lipid nanotube-vesicle networks are important channels for intercellular communication and transport of matter. Experimentally observed in neighboring mammalian cells, but also reproduced in model membrane systems, a broad consensus exists…
A common mechanism for intracellular transport is the use of controlled deformations of the membrane to create spherical or tubular buds. While the basic physical properties of homogeneous membranes are relatively well-known, the effects 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…
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,…
Microtubules are key structural elements of living cells that are crucial for cell division, intracellular transport and motility. Recent experiments have shown that microtubule severing proteins and molecular motors stimulate the direct…
Biomembranes, which are mainly composed of neutral and charged lipids, exhibit a large variety of functional structures and dynamics. Here, we report a coarse-grained molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of the phase separation and…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
BAR superfamily proteins have a banana-shaped domain that causes the local bending of lipid membranes. We study as to how such a local anisotropic curvature induces effective interaction between proteins and changes the global shape of…
We study the indentation of a free-standing lipid membrane suspended over a nanopore on a hydrophobic substrate by means of molecular dynamics simulations. We find that in the course of indentation, the membrane bends at the point of…
Bridging the gap between atomistic detail and continuum mechanics is a central challenge in modeling biological membranes, particularly for mesoscopic phenomena spanning large length and time scales. In this work, we introduce a new,…
We present experiments demonstrating tube formation in giant unilamellar vesicles that are suspended in a bath of swimming E. coli bacteria. We chose the lipids such that the bacteria have no adhereing interaction with the membrane. The…
The assembly of banana-shaped rodlike proteins on membranes, and the associated membrane shape transformations, are investigated by analytical theory and coarse-grained simulations. The membrane-mediated interactions between two…
The need for organisms to regulate their volume and osmolarity when surrounded by freshwater is a basic physical challenge for many bacteria, protists and algae. Taking inspiration from the contractile vacuole complex found in many…
Membrane tubes (spicules) arise in cells, or artificial membranes, in the nonlinear deformation regime due to, e.g. the growth of microtubules, actin filaments or sickle hemoglobin fibers towards a membrane. We calculate the axial force…
Lipid bilayer membranes undergo rapid bending undulations with wavelengths from tens of nanometers to tens of microns due to thermal fluctuations. Here, we probe such undulations and the membranes' mechanics by measuring the time-varying…
Soft interfaces formed by lipid membranes are fundamental to living cells, synthetic cells, and membrane-based soft materials. However, a quantitative framework linking molecular organization with nonlinear interfacial mechanics remains…
Cell membranes separate the cell interior from the external environment. They are constituted by a variety of lipids; their composition determines the dynamics of membrane proteins and affects the ability of the cells to adapt. Even though…