Related papers: Microparticle assembly pathways on lipid membranes

How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…

Due to the potential applications in biomedical engineering, it becomes more and more important to understand the process of engulfment and internalization of nanoparticles (NPs) by cell membranes. Despite the fact that the interaction…

The assembly of curved protein rods on fluid membranes is studied using implicit-solvent meshless membrane simulations. As the rod curvature increases, the rods on a membrane tube assemble along the azimuthal direction first and…

Nanoparticles with hydrophobic capping ligands and amphiphilic phospholipids are both found to self-assemble into monolayer films when deposited on the air water interface. By separately measuring the anisotropic stress response of these…

We consider the lateral diffusion of a protein interacting with the curvature of the membrane. The interaction energy is minimized if the particle is at a membrane position with a certain curvature that agrees with the spontaneous curvature…

Particles with directional interactions are promising building blocks for new functional materials and may serve as models for biological structures. Mutually attractive nanoparticles that are deformable due to flexible surface groups, for…

Biological membranes are shaped by various proteins that either generate inward or outward membrane curvature. In this article, we investigate the membrane morphologies induced by mixtures of arc-shaped particles with coarse-grained…

Amphipathic peptides are considered promising antibiotics because of their ability to form pores in bacterial membranes. In two companion papers, we analyzed both experimentally and theoretically the mechanisms and consequences of the…

Soft particles can be better emulsifiers than hard particles because they stretch at fluid interfaces. This deformation can increase adsorption energies by orders of magnitude relative to rigid particles. The deformation of a particle at an…

We present a novel buckling instability relevant to membrane budding in eukaryotic cells. In this mechanism, curved filaments bind to a lipid bilayer without changing its intrinsic curvature. As more and more filaments adsorb, newly added…

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,…

Capillarity-driven self-assembly at fluidic interfaces offers a scalable route to large, reconfigurable materials. Microscale particles with high horizontal-to-vertical aspect ratios become attractive building blocks for shape-directed…

We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…

Assembled monolayers of colloidal particles are crucial for various applications, including opto-electronics, surface engineering, as well as light harvesting, and catalysis. A common approach for self-assembly is the drying of a colloidal…

The ability of virus shells to encapsulate a wide range of functional cargoes, especially multiple cargoes - siRNAs, enzymes, and chromophores - has made them an essential tool in biotechnology for advancing drug delivery applications and…

Large protein complexes are assembled from protein subunits to form a specific structure. In our theoretic work, we propose that assembly into the correct structure could be reliably achieved through an assembly line with a specific…

Biomolecular condensates are liquid- or gel-like droplets of proteins and nucleic acids formed at least in part through liquid-liquid phase separation. Condensates enable diverse functions of cells and the pathogens that infect them,…

In granular media, the presence of even small amounts of interparticle cohesion manifests as an increase in the bulk strength and stiffness, effects that are typically associated with an increase in the average number of constraints per…

Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…

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…