Related papers: Phase transitions in biological systems with many …
Biomolecular condensates constitute a newly recognized form of spatial organization in living cells. Although many condensates are believed to form as a result of phase separation, the physicochemical properties that determine the phase…
Phase separation, crucial for spatially segregating biomolecules in cells, is well-understood in the simple case of a few components with pairwise interactions. Yet, biological cells challenge the simple picture in at least two ways: First,…
Liquid mixtures of many interacting components often exhibit numerous coexisting types of droplets. An exciting example is the cytosol of biological cells, where diverse droplets, called condensates, are essential for cellular function.…
Phase separation and transitions among different molecular states are ubiquitous in living cells. Such transitions can be governed by local equilibrium thermodynamics or by active processes controlled by biological fuel. It remains largely…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
Phase separation plays an role in determining the self-assembly of biological and soft-matter systems. In biological systems, liquid-liquid phase separation inside a cell leads to the formation of various macromolecular aggregates. The…
Biological cells exhibit a hierarchical spatial organization, where various compartments harbor condensates that form by phase separation. Cells can control the emergence of these condensates by affecting compartment size, the amount of the…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
Phase separation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatial organization inside biological cells. However, despite the clear relevance to virtually all physiological functions, we understand surprisingly little about what phases…
Spontaneous phase separation, or demixing, is important in biological phenomena such as cell sorting. In particle-based models, an open question is whether differences in diffusivity can drive such demixing. While…
Phase separation drives the formation of biomolecular condensates in cells, which comprise many components and sometimes possess multiple phases. The equilibrium physics of phase separation is well understood, but many components in…
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
Understanding the phase behavior of mixtures with many components is important in many contexts, including as a key step toward a physics-based description of intracellular compartmentalization. Here, we study the instabilities of a mixture…
The separation of substances into different phases is ubiquitous in nature and important scientifically and technologically. This phenomenon may become drastically different if the species involved, whether molecules or supramolecular…
Biomolecular condensates in cells are often rich in catalytically-active enzymes. This is particularly true in the case of the large enzymatic complexes known as metabolons, which contain different enzymes that participate in the same…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Phase separation of two phase separating solutes in a common solvent can result in mesoscale (micron-sized) droplets with complex topologies of the domains of each solute within each droplet. Such topologies have been observed in-vitro in…
The self-organization of proteins into enriched compartments and the formation of complex patterns are crucial processes for life on the cellular level. Liquid-liquid phase separation is one mechanism for forming such enriched compartments.…