Related papers: Structural symmetry and membrane curvature sensing
Recent findings suggest that shell protein distribution and morphology of bacterial microcompartments regulate the chemical fluxes facilitating reactions which dictate their biological function. We explore how the morphology and component…
The assembly of banana-shaped rodlike proteins on membranes, and the associated membrane shape transformations, are investigated by analytical theory and coarse-grained simulations. The membrane-mediated interactions between two…
In multicomponent membranes, internal scalar fields may couple to membrane curvature, thus renormalizing the membrane elastic constants and destabilizing the flat membranes. Here, a general elasticity theory of membranes is considered that…
Curvature-sensing and curvature-remodeling proteins are known to reshape cell membranes, and this remodeling event is essential for key biophysical processes such as tubulation, exocytosis, and endocytosis. Curvature-inducing proteins can…
Eukaryote cells have a flexible shape, which dynamically changes according to the function performed by the cell. One mechanism for deforming the cell membrane into the desired shape is through the expression of curved membrane proteins.…
Biological membranes constitute boundaries of cells and cell organelles. Physico-chemical mechanisms at the atomic scale are dictated by protein-lipid interaction strength, lipid composition, lipid distribution in the vicinity of the…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Native protein folds often have a high degree of symmetry. We study the relationship between the symmetries of native proteins, and their designabilities -- how many different sequences encode a given native structure. Using a…
The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…
Mapping between sequence and structure is currently an open problem in structural biology. Despite many experimental and computational efforts it is not clear yet how the structure is encoded in the sequence. Answering this question may…
The ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with substrate stiffness increasingly being found to be a key signalling factor. Although active…
Curvature-inducing proteins containing a Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs domain often have intrinsically disordered domains. Recent experiments have shown that these disordered chains enhance curvature sensing and generation. Here, we report on the…
Cell adhesion proteins are transmembrane proteins that bind cells to their environment. These proteins typically cluster into disk-shaped or linear structures. Here we show that such clustering patterns spontaneously emerge when the protein…
Unravelling the physical mechanisms behind the organisation of lipid domains is a central goal in cell biology and membrane biophysics. Previous studies on cells and model lipid bilayers featuring phase-separated domains found an intricate…
Peripheral membrane proteins can reversibly and specifically bind to biological membranes to carry out functions such as cell signalling, enzymatic activity, or membrane remodelling. Structures of these proteins and of their lipid-binding…
The quantitative understanding of membranes is still rooted in work performed in the 1970s by Helfrich and others, concerning amphiphilic bilayers. However, most biological membranes contain a wide variety of nonamphiphilic molecules too.…
We study the equilibrium shapes of vesicles, with an in-plane nematic order, using a Monte-Carlo scheme and show that highly curved shapes, like tubes and discs, with a striking similarity to the structures engendered by certain curvature…
Cellular membranes are elastic lipid bilayers that contain a variety of proteins, including ion channels, receptors, and scaffolding proteins. These proteins are known to diffuse in the plane of the membrane and to influence the bending of…
A continuum electromechanical model is proposed to describe the membrane curvature induced by electrostatic interactions in a solvated protein-membrane system. The model couples the macroscopic strain energy of membrane and the…
Integral membrane proteins deform the surrounding bilayer creating long-ranged forces that influence distant proteins. These forces can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the proteins' shape, height, contact angle with the bilayer, as…