Related papers: Phase transitions in biological systems with many …
Mixtures of microtubules and molecular motors form active materials with diverse dynamical behaviors that vary based on their constituents' molecular properties. We map the non-equilibrium phase diagram of microtubules and tip-accumulating…
Multi-component membranes such as ternary mixtures of lipids and cholesterol can exhibit coexistence regions between two liquid phases. When such membranes adhere to a corrugated substrate, the phase separation process strongly depends on…
Liquid-liquid phase separation of liquids exhibiting interconversion between alternative states has been proposed as an underlying mechanism for fluid polyamorphism, and may be of relevance to protein function and intracellular…
The formation of polarized signaling domains on cell membranes is a fundamental example of biological pattern formation. While such patterns resemble structures from equilibrium phase separation, they are intrinsically non-equilibrium,…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
Much of our mechanistic understanding of the functions of biological macromolecules is based on static structural experiments, which can be modelled either as single structures or conformational ensembles. While these provide us with…
Heterogeneities in the cell membrane due to coexisting lipid phases have been conjectured to play a major functional role in cell signaling and membrane trafficking. Thereby the material properties of multiphase systems, such as the line…
Metabolic heterogeneity is widely recognised as the next challenge in our understanding of non-genetic variation. A growing body of evidence suggests that metabolic heterogeneity may result from the inherent stochasticity of intracellular…
We formulate the configurational partition function for dendrimers, taking explicit account of their conformations and segmental interactions. Two approximate schemes are presented, one based on the effective dendrimer-dendrimer…
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…
Complex systems are often characterized by the interplay of multiple interconnected dynamical processes operating across a range of temporal scales. This phenomenon is widespread in both biological and artificial scenarios, making it…
Biological membranes are host to proteins and molecules which may form domain-like structures resulting in spatially-varying material properties. Vesicles with such heterogeneous membranes can exhibit intricate shapes at equilibrium and…
Many biological processes are supported by special molecules, called motor proteins or molecular motors, that transport cellular cargoes along linear protein filaments and can reversibly associate to their tracks. Stimulated by these…
A novel mechanism for cell differentiation is proposed, based on the dynamic clustering in a globally coupled chaotic system. A simple model with metabolic reaction, active transport of chemicals from media, and cell division is found to…
Mixtures of several macromolecular species can lead to the formation of higher-order structures that often display non-ideal mixing behavior. In this work, we propose a minimal model of a quaternary system which considers the formation of a…
Many intracellular processes continue to oscillate during the cell cycle. Although it is not well-understood how they are affected by discontinuities in the cellular environment, the general assumption is that oscillations remain robust…
We study binary mixtures of small active and big passive athermal particles interacting via soft repulsive forces on a frictional substrate. Athermal self propelled particles are known to phase separate into a dense aggregate and a dilute…
We study a mechanism for reliable switching in biomolecular signal-transduction cascades. Steady bistable states are created by system-size cooperative effects in populations of proteins, in spite of the fact that the phosphorylation-state…
For the study of complex synthetic and biological molecular systems by computer simulations one is still restricted to simple model systems or to by far too small time scales. To overcome this problem multiscale techniques are being…
Quenched or frozen-in structural disorder is ubiquitous in real experimental systems. Much of the progress is achieved in understanding the phase separation of such systems using the diffusion-driven coarsening in Ising model with quenched…