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When considering flows in biological membranes, they are usually treated as flat, though more often than not, they are curved surfaces, even extremely curved, as in the case of the endoplasmic reticulum. Here, we study the topological…
Mixtures of lipids and cholesterol are commonly used as model systems for studying the formation of liquid-ordered ($L_o$) domains in heterogeneous biological membranes. The simplest model system exhibiting coexistence between $L_o$ domains…
In order to precisely quantify the fundamental interactions between heterogeneous lipid membranes with coexisting liquid-ordered (Lo) and liquid-disordered (Ld) domains, we performed detailed osmotic stress SAXS experiments by exploiting…
There are a great many proteins that localize to and collectively generate curvature in biological fluid membranes. We study changes in the topology of fluid membranes due to the presence of highly anisotropic, curvature-inducing proteins.…
Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) are known to play an important role in the communication between distant cells and to deliver biological information throughout the body. To date, many studies have focused on the role of sEVs…
Multicomponent bilayer structures arise as the ubiquitous plasma membrane in cellular biology and as blends of amphiphilic copolymers used in electrolyte membranes, drug delivery, and emulsion stabilization within the context of synthetic…
In spite of the great success that all-atom molecular dynamics simulations have seen in revealing the nature of the lipid bilayer, the interplay between a membrane's curvature and dynamics remains elusive. This is largely due to the…
We study the geometric properties of the energy landscape of coarse-grained, off-lattice models of polymers by endowing the configuration space with a suitable metric, depending on the potential energy function, such that the dynamical…
We characterize the order-disorder transition in a model lipid bilayer using molecular dynamics simulations. We find that the ordered phase is hexatic. In particular, in-plane structures possess a finite concentration of 5-7 disclination…
To understand mechanism of cell-membrane compartmentalization, we studied coarse-grained model systems consisting of lipid and cholesterol molecules. Cholesterol plays crucial role in lateral phase segregation in the bilayered lipid…
We investigate the microphase separation in a membrane composed of charged lipid, by taking into account explicitly the electrostatic potential and the ion densities in the surrounding solvent. While the overall (membrane and solvent)…
The very low sliding friction of articular cartilage in the major synovial joints such as hips and knees is crucial for their well-being, and has been attributed to lubrication by phospholipid boundary layers. While single-component lipid…
Lipid-bilayers are the fundamental constituents of the walls of most living cells and lipid vesicles, giving them shape and compartment. The formation and growing of pores in a lipid bilayer have attracted considerable attention from an…
Lipolysis is a life-essential metabolic process, which supplies fatty acids stored in lipid droplets to the body in order to match the demands of building new cells and providing cellular energy. In this paper, we present a first…
In cell membranes, proteins and lipids diffuse in a highly crowded and heterogeneous landscape, where aggregates and dense domains of proteins or lipids obstruct the path of diffusing molecules. In general, hindered motion gives rise to…
Recent advances in high-resolution experimental methods have highlighted the significance of cell signal pathway crosstalk and localised signalling activity in the development and disease of numerous biological systems. The investigation of…
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…
Many essential cellular processes, including cell division and the establishment of cell polarity during embryogenesis, are regulated by pattern-forming proteins. These proteins often need to bind to a substrate, such as the cell membrane,…
We propose a model describing liquid-solid phase coexistence in mixed lipid membranes by including explicitly the occurrence of a rippled phase. For a single component membrane, we employ a previous model in which the membrane thickness is…
We study a model for lipid-bilayer membrane vesicles exhibiting phase separation, incorporating a phase field together with membrane fluidity and bending elasticity. We prove the existence of a plethora of equilibria in the large,…