Related papers: Phase transitions in biological membranes
Two dimensional crystalline membranes in isotropic embedding space exhibit a flat phase with anomalous elasticity, relevant e.g., for graphene. Here we study their thermal fluctuations in the absence of exact rotational invariance in the…
Large-scale cellular transformations are triggered by subtle physical and structural changes in individual biomacromolecular and membrane components. A prototypical example of such an event is the orchestrated fusion of membranes within an…
Clarifying the factors that control the contact angle of a liquid on a solid substrate is a long-standing scientific problem pertinent across physics, chemistry and materials science. Progress has been hampered by the lack of a…
In multicellular organisms, epithelial cells form layers separating compartments responsible for different physiological functions. At the early stage of epithelial layer formation, each cell of an aggregate defines an inner and an outer…
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…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
The phase structure of self-avoiding polymerized membranes is studied by extensive Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations. Several folding transitions from the flat to a collapsed state are found. Using a suitable order parameter and finite size…
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…
Classical phase transitions, like solid-liquid-gas or order-disorder spin magnetic phases, are all driven by thermal energy fluctuations by varying the temperature. On the other hand, quantum phase transitions happen at absolute zero…
When DNA molecules are heated they denature. This occurs locally so that loops of molten single DNA strands form, connected by intact double-stranded DNA pieces. The properties of this "melting" transition have been intensively…
Recent work has highlighted roles for thermodynamic phase behavior in diverse cellular processes. Proteins and nucleic acids can phase separate into three-dimensional liquid droplets in the cytoplasm and nucleus and the plasma membrane of…
The Vertex Model for epithelia models the apical surface of the tissue by a tiling, with polygons representing cells and edges representing cell-cell junctions. The mechanics are described by an energy governed by deviations from a target…
Quantum phase transitions occur at zero temperature when some non-thermal control-parameter like pressure or chemical composition is changed. They are driven by quantum rather than thermal fluctuations. In this review we first give a…
Surface phase transitions in surfactant adsorption layers are known to affect the dynamic properties of foams and to induce surface nucleation in freezing emulsion drops. Recently, these transitions were found to play a role in several…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the mechanical relaxation of cells within a curved epithelial tissue layer represented by an arbitrary curve in two-dimensional space. This model generalises previous one-dimensional models…
Liquids with quasi - chemical bonding between molecules are described in terms of vertex model. It is shown that this bonding results in liquid - liquid phase transition, which occurs between phases with different mean density of…
By means of lattice-based Monte Carlo simulations, we address properties of two-component lipid membranes on the experimentally relevant spatial scales of order of a micrometer and time intervals of order of a second, using DMPC/DSPC lipid…
Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…