Related papers: Thermodynamic competition between membrane protein…
In this perspective we describe the critical role membranes play in modulating the structures of the Amyloid Precursor Proteins to produce the peptides involved in the Alzheimer's disease. Some of the key concepts related to protein…
We report here a new entropic mechanism of protein thermostability due to residual dynamics of rotamer isomerization in native state. All-atom simulations show that Lysines have much greater number of accessible rotamers than Arginines in…
Protein-mediated interactions are ubiquitous in the cellular environment, and particularly in the nucleus, where they are responsible for the structuring of chromatin. We show through molecular--dynamics simulations of a polymer surrounded…
Protein folding, peptide aggregation and crystallization, as well as adsorption of molecules on soft or solid substrates have an essential feature in common: In all these processes, structure formation is guided by a collective, cooperative…
The cell membrane is inherently asymmetric and heterogeneous in its composition, a feature that is crucial for its function. Using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, the physical properties of a 3-component asymmetric mixed lipid…
We have extended our recent molecular-dynamic simulations of memristors to include the effect of thermal inhomogeneities on mobile ionic species appearing during operation of the device. Simulations show a competition between an attractive…
Numerous cellular functions rely on protein$\unicode{x2013}$protein interactions. Efforts to comprehensively characterize them remain challenged however by the diversity of molecular recognition mechanisms employed within the proteome. Deep…
We discuss a realistic scenario, accounting for the existence of sub-micrometric protein domains in cell membranes. At the biological level, such membrane domains have been shown to be specialized, in order to perform a determined…
We present a new mechanochemical modeling framework to explore the shape deformation and pattern formation in multicomponent vesicle membranes. In this framework, the shape of the membrane is described by an elastic bending model, while…
The equilibrium behavior of binary mixtures can be understood through the competition of energy scales, which classifies their corresponding phase diagrams into distinct topological regimes (Types I-IV). However, in many soft-matter…
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…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
By performing molecular dynamics simulations with up to 132 million coarse-grained particles in half-micron sized boxes, we show that hydrodynamics quantitatively explains the finite-size effects on diffusion of lipids, proteins, and carbon…
Within the frame of an effective, coarse-grained hydrophobic-polar protein model, we employ multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations to investigate free-energy landscapes and folding channels of exemplified heteropolymer sequences, which are…
A physical scenario accounting for the existence of size-limited submicrometric domains in cell membranes is proposed. It is based on the numerical investigation of the counterpart, in lipidic membranes where proteins are diffusing, of the…
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…
Motivated by a long-standing debate concerning the nature and interrelations of surface-tension variables in fluid membranes, we reformulate the thermodynamics of a membrane vesicle as a generic two-dimensional finite system enclosing a…
Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) composed of as few as three lipid species can phase separate into small-scale lipid domains with stripes and dots patterns. These patterns have been experimentally characterized in terms of how their size…
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of lipid membranes with proteins that actively pump ions across the membrane. We find that the activity leads to a fluctuating force distribution due to electrostatic interactions arising from variation…
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,…